The English Hymn: A Critical and Historical Study

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The English Hymn

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The English Hymn A Critical and Historical Study

J. R. Watson

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi São Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © J. R. Watson 1997, 1999 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 1999 Paperback first published 1999 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data applied for ISBN 0-19-827002-X

To Ralph Waller


Preface Some explanation ought perhaps to be offered for writing another book on the English hymn. I have written this one because I have not found those books which have already been written to be particularly helpful in any attempt to understand why the words of one hymn are interesting, or much-loved, or long-lasting, and those of another are not. Most of the writing about hymns has been done by the clergy or by musicians (or by clergy-musicians) and has concentrated on the use of hymns for worship, on the content of hymns, or on their tunes. Some books rely upon anecdotes, and others, such as the lively and stimulating books by Erik Routley, on subjective evaluations, or on an assessment of the value of the hymn's content (often in relation to church worship). The best book on the subject, Louis F. Benson's The English Hymn, dates from 1915, and rarely ventures into critical or even descriptive language. Apart from the work by Donald Davie and Lionel Adey, and on the eighteenth-century hymn by Madeleine Forrell Marshall and Janet Todd, there has not been much serious attention to the words of a hymn, treating them as part of a literary text in the way that one might examine a poem (Susan S. Tamke's admirable Make a Joyful Noise unto the Lord is mainly a study of the sociology of hymns), although there have been some excellent studies of individual writers, such as those on Charles Wesley by Frank Baker. Occasionally there are books called (say) Hymns as Poetry, and questions are sometimes asked about whether or not a hymn can be poetry; but on the whole the texts of hymns have received little serious critical study from students of English literature. This book is an attempt to provide that study. It is different from most of the others because it is a work of literary criticism, rather than a study of the content and usefulness of hymns in a liturgical setting. It is best described by indicating some of the things which it is not. It is not about hymns in worship, although I hope that its treatment of the texts will sometimes result in a deeper understanding which will be beneficial to church worship. Nor is it a book about hymns and their tunes, although there is some reference to the singing of hymns in the first part of Chapter 2. I am convinced that the tunes are important, but I am not qualified to write about them; the best examination of them is (in my

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PREFACE

view) John Wilson's essay ‘Looking at Hymn Tunes: The Objective Factors’ in Duty and Delight: Routley Remembered, details of which will be found in the bibliography. For the purposes of the present book, Wilson's article renders further discussion unnecessary, in that it says all that I would have wanted to say (and more); moreover, I have quite enough to do in examining the words of hymns. In doing so, I have tried to get further than the customary gestures of admiration which are found in most books about hymns: if a writer has referred to ‘this fine hymn’, I have tried to see why it should have been thought of as fine. I have also tried to see why a hymn should be as it is, by examining its provenance, not from the author so much as from the circumstances of worship, history, and theology in which it was written. This book does not spend time arguing about whether a hymn can be ‘poetry’. This is, in my view, an old-fashioned and unnecessary question, based upon some idea of ‘poetry’ which is almost certainly subjective and indefensible, if only because poetry can be so many things. There seems to be no reason why a good hymn should not be one kind of poetry, in the way that the ballad, the lyric, or the dramatic monologue are all ‘poetry’. I have tried, rather, to demonstrate what kind of poetry hymnody is, its characteristics as a genre with its own rhetoric and language. Nor is this book a complete study of all hymnody. It begins with the Reformation, and ends before the ‘hymn explosion’ of the last thirty years. It is entitled a ‘study’, not a survey, and I have not felt obliged to deal with everything. The first six chapters, for example, are concerned with the development of Protestant hymnody since the Reformation, and make no reference to Counter-Reformation hymnody. The main thrust of this part of the book is towards the understanding of English hymnody in relation to the biblical hermeneutics and individual expression encouraged by the Reformation. It begins, therefore, with The Whole Booke of Psalmes and ends with Isaac Watts. It continues with Addison, Doddridge, Anne Steele, the Wesleys, and their Evangelical successors, which make up a significant second part, turning to a very different mode in the hymnody of the Romantic period. In the nineteenth century, the trickle becomes a flood, and Victorian hymns embody the cross-currents of religious thought, as well as the question of women's writing, before changing again at the beginning of this century. I have therefore discussed the major figures, rather than attempted a complete coverage: such a procedure would have resulted in an impossibly long book. As it is, this study will be big enough, though not as big as it could have been (and, indeed, was, at one point); it is long partly because there is so much material, and partly because I have tried to avoid the ‘mention-must-also-be-made-of-George-Wither’ kind of approach. Nevertheless, I have been continually aware that there is more to be said: I have

PREFACE

ix

continually wished that I could have had time and space to apply to hymn texts the kind of sensitivity to rhyme and rhythm, pause and phrase, that is found in the best criticism, such as that of Christopher Ricks. Nevertheless, this book is a start: and I hope that it will encourage others to undertake the serious study of individual authors and movements: there is much work waiting to be done. One great exception to the general neglect of the English hymn by literary critics is found in the work of Donald Davie. His death, just as I was finishing this book, has deprived criticism of one of its finest exponents. His brilliant insights—those of a distinguished poet—into the language and tone of hymns, and of the translations of the metrical psalmists, have shown that it is possible to write of them seriously and with discrimination. In writing the present book I have tried to follow his example, and also attempted to provide a chronological study—systematic though not complete—of the development of the genre. In so doing I have become aware of the need to consider the text of a hymn in terms of its language, metre, and form, as well as understanding it in relation to its own time. At the end of Chapter 1 I have discussed the critical issues which are involved; this section engages with the problems of language and of reading, and in so doing I have found it necessary, in Julia Kristeva's words, to ‘speak to’ the hymn by using some contemporary critical theory. The first two chapters are designed as critical and technical approaches to the subject, which enable the subsequent history and individual examples to be seen more distinctly. In addition, the first two chapters should make clear some of the processes which are involved in the reading and singing of hymns. At the same time as recording the hope that I can illuminate the hymn genre from the point of view of a literary critic, I would also like to think that this book will do something to preserve the idea of the hymn as it once was, an important feature of a religious service and a living expression of the human spirit. The loss of hymns from school assemblies, and the almost exclusive use of modern hymns or songs in some churches, suggest that the older generations now living may well be the last for whom the traditional hymn is an integral part of their emotional and spiritual culture. The English hymn is in danger of becoming a subject for academic study rather than a living form of worship, and I wanted to write this book while it was still alive, while it was still some kind of presence in liturgy and life. I think it is very possible that for the twenty-first century Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley will be as much of an historical curiosity as The Whole Booke of Psalmes is to the twentieth—one or two of its psalms are known, but the remainder have long since fallen into disuse. I would also like to think that this book might do something to make the traditional hymns more valued, but I think it has probably come too late to prevent the wholesale clearance of old forms which is accompanying the arrival of new ones. Nevertheless,

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I feel bound to record my sense of the English hymn before it disappears in the name of progress. I came to this book partly through sadness at the decline of the hymn, and partly as a progression from other work. From an interest in landscape, I developed an interest in sacred landscape, in Wordsworth especially, and then in the whole area of literature and religion. At the same time, I was appointed to the committee which made Hymns and Psalms (1983), and later found myself (with Kenneth Trickett and others) writing the Companion to it. This book followed naturally upon the work for that, and I was much encouraged not only by reading Davie, but also by the sharp and incisive work of Lionel Adey. In the writing of it I have incurred many debts. The principal one is to the Council of the University of Durham, which awarded me the Sir Derman Christopherson Foundation Fellowship for the academic year 1989–90 to enable me to begin. I am grateful for early encouragement from Professor Emrys Jones, Professor Stephen Prickett, and Dr Ivor Jones. Colleagues and friends in Durham who have read drafts of this work in progress and given generously of their time to discuss them with me include Ann Moss, David Jasper, Tom Craik, Pat Waugh, and Jan Rhodes. Kenneth Trickett, my co-editor of the Companion to Hymns and Psalms, heroically read an earlier and much longer version of the whole book. I am also very grateful to Beth Rainey and the staff in the Palace Green Section of the University of Durham Library: the chance to write about Bishop Cosin's ‘Come Holy Ghost, our souls inspire’ in his own library, now part of the university, was especially pleasing. I have also been courteously assisted by the librarians in the British Library, Glasgow University Library, the Library of New College, Edinburgh, and Dr Williams's Library. I owe special thanks to Don E. Saliers, of the Candler School of Theology, Emory University, Atlanta; Henry McAdam, of the Speer Memorial Library, Princeton Theological Seminary; and Nancy Wicklund, of the Talbott Library, Westminster Choir College, Princeton. The Pratt Green Trustees generously supported the work in its final stages, allowing me to use the valuable assistance of Elizabeth Hook. Perhaps the best reason for writing a book on hymns is that many of them have been familiar to me since childhood, and that I have now sought to explain something of my enduring love for them. I hope that readers who have experienced through the singing and reading of hymns the same memories, and the same feelings of delight, wonder, and strange fascination, will find something to interest them in this book. J. R. Watson Durham December 1995

Contents 1. Discussing Hymns: The State of the Art 2. The Singing of Hymns, and the Experience of Metre 3. Laud unto the Lord: The Whole Booke of Psalmes 4. Keeping Company with David's Psalms: George Wither and Others 5. The Seventeenth-Century Anglican Tradition 6. The Journey to Zion: Puritan Psalms and Hymns 7. Isaac Watts 8. After Watts 9. John and Charles Wesley 10. Charles Wesley and His Art 11. After the Wesleys 12. The Romantic Period: Montgomery, Heber, Keble 13. The Victorian Hymn 14. The Oxford Movement, and the Revival of Ancient Hymnody 15. Hymns Ancient and Modern 16. Victorian Women Hymn-Writers 17. American Hymnody 18. Different Traditions 19. Into the Twentieth Century Select Bibliography Index

1 22 42 57 81 103 133 171 205 230 265 300 335 355 387 422 461 486 511 533 547


1 Discussing Hymns: The State of the Art Sometimes a Light Surprizes (Olney Hymns, 1779) The English hymn is not an easy subject for a literary critic. It is known as a verse species of some kind, but it has traditionally been regarded as a second-rate poetic form, limited in its aims and expressions, and disfigured by sentimentality, inflexible metres, self-congratulation, and religiosity. Its subject-matter, and the fact that it is designed for singing in worship, have ensured that it has been regarded as primarily religious and only marginally and accidentally as a part of literature. Dr Johnson summed up what he saw as its limitations in a trenchant paragraph: The essence of poetry is invention; such invention as, by producing something unexpected, surprises and delights. The topics of devotion are few, and being few are universally known; but, few as they are, they can be made no more; they receive no grace from novelty of sentiment, and very little from novelty of expression.1 The charge that hymns cannot produce surprise and delight is linked to the suggestion that their expression is limited and pedestrian; this is undoubtedly true of some hymns, and of parts of the worship with which they are associated. It has led some poets, such as Tennyson (and Isaac Watts before him) to suggest that a hymn requires a certain discipline, a constraint so strict that it excludes the free and original (and by implication the imaginative and poetical). Thus Tennyson said: A good hymn is the most difficult thing in the world to write. In a good hymn you have to be commonplace and poetical. The moment you cease to be commonplace and put in any expression at all out of the common, it ceases to be a hymn.2 Indeed, the very nature of hymns, and of the hymn form, is determined by the fact that they do not seem to be free to produce the ‘invention’ of which Johnson writes. They are designed to be a part of worship, they make up one element of the praise of God in church services, and they have to be

1

Samuel Johnson, Lives of the Poets, ‘Waller’, in The Works of Samuel Johnson (London, 1787), ii. 267.

2

Hallam Tennyson, Tennyson: A Memoir (one-vol. edn., London, 1899), 754.

2

DISCUSSING HYMNS: THE STATE OF THE ART

easily and quickly comprehended; and as a result their content and expression are limited. St Augustine dened a hymn as follows: It is a singing to the praise of God. If you praise God, and do not sing, you utter no hymn. If you sing, and praise no God, you utter no hymn. If you praise anything which does not pertain to the praise of God, though in singing you praise, you utter no hymn.3 This definition draws a sharp line between the sacred and the secular, emphasizes the role of music in hymnody, and accepts the limitations of subject-matter; and the result of the hymn having its primary function in worship is that it has seemed to many writers to have been cut off from the freer spaces of the poetic imagination, to have been imprisoned by its need to be clear, singable, and simple. Johnson identified this as a problem in his ‘Life of Watts’: His ear was well-tuned, and his diction was elegant and copious. But his devotional poetry is, like that of others, unsatisfactory. The paucity of its topics enforces perpetual repetition, and the sanctity of the matter rejects the ornaments of figurative diction. It is sufficient for Watts to have done better than others what no man has done well.4 In this reading, poetry is universal in its treatment of human emotion, and free in its employment of figurative language, whereas hymns are not; as we shall see, hymns do use plenty of ‘the ornaments of figurative diction’, and I shall argue that what Johnson calls elsewhere ‘the intercourse between God and the human soul’ is anything but limited. Nevertheless, there persists an impression that hymns are somehow unpoetical, partly because they are designed to function as an element of a church service, and partly because they have to be simple, orthodox, and able to be sung. And certainly there can be a marked difference between hymns and poetry, as we may see in the treatment of Divine Providence by, say, Cowper: Judge not the Lord by feeble sense, But trust him for his grace; Behind a frowning Providence He hides a smiling face (‘God moves in a mysterious way’) and by Gerard Manley Hopkins, in ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’:

3

St Augustine, note to Psalm 148; quoted in John Julian, A Dictionary of Hymnology (London, 1892), 640. It was St Augustine who recalled in the Confessions how deeply he had been moved by the singing of the psalms and hymns at Milan, and how he experienced the church's chant as a breath of God's grace, ‘able to move one's spirit to devotion and to enkindle the heart with divine love’ (Adolar Zumkeller, Augustine's Ideal of the Religious Life, trans. Edmund Colledge (New York, 1986), 49).

4

Johnson, Lives of the Poets, ‘Watts’, Works, iv. 188.


3

No, not uncomforted: lovely-felicitous Providence Finger of a tender of, O of a feathery delicacy, the breast of the Maiden could obey so, be a bell to, ring of it, and Startle the poor sheep back! Cowper deals with a single image, that of a frowning outside (like a mask) with a smiling face inside—as in an adult's game with a small child; Hopkins's images allow the mind to encounter numerous cross-fertilizing images and ideas. The Providence of God is beautiful, felicitously so, holding us with a gentle and loving hand, having the delicacy of a feather, yet at the same time commanding obedience, ringing like a bell, and controlling the sheep like a sheepdog. The words jump in the line, and the syntax surprises; the images multiply, stirring the imagination to activity, to an appreciation of richness, variety, and wonder. Except for the idea of feathery delicacy, these can be seen as traditional attributes of God's Providence—we speak of God as our father, who has a tender hand, who requires our obedience, and we speak of ourselves as lost sheep—but in Hopkins's handling the rhythms and the oblique statements, together with the sheer energy of the language, avoid cliché. Cowper is not in any sense worse as a poet, but simply different—less abundant, and more circumscribed: he is taking an incident from common life, a child's game, and making it into a pattern of religious significance. In one sense, that of the original creative conception of the image, he even seems more original than Hopkins, whose ideas are for the most part those of traditional praise and prayer; but it is easy to think that Cowper is inferior, less complex, less imaginative, if only because his verse requires the mind to be less rapid and active. This is an extreme case, but it may serve as an example of the way in which hymns seem to be constrained and limited by the formal requirements of worship, whereas poetry appears to be freer, more open to suggestion, more plural in meaning, richer in imaginative power: Hopkins's mind can play with different images for Providence, and with unusual rhythms. Hymns are compelled to be regular in metre and rhyme: Robert Lowell described them as the ‘Bible chopped and crucified’ In hymns we hear but do not read and in the same poem, ‘Waking Early Sunday Morning’, he contrasted hymns with the Bible and with poetry: none of the wilder subtleties of grace or art will sweeten these stiff quatrains shovelled out four-square5

5

Robert Lowell, ‘Waking Early Sunday Morning’, Near the Ocean (London, 1967), 14. Lowell goes on to say that hymns ‘ . . . sing of peace, and preach despair; | yet they gave darkness some control, | and left a loophole for the soul.’

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In Lowell's vivid severities we can hear again Dr Johnson's complaint about the absence of surprise and delight, this time transferred to metre. Similarly, there are constraints on the subject-matter: the hymn is not expected to sow doubt in the mind of the singer, or produce complex and contradictory emotions, or express frustration, anxiety or confusion. Hymns do not often use irony, that commonest of twentieth-century modes; instead they express assurance and banish doubt (‘Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine’). Hymns of this kind seem very simple, not only in metre and image, but in their whole mode of operation. Apart from the portrayals of the Crucifixion, there does not seem much awareness, in hymnody, of misery and suffering, of the great dilemmas of the human situation, of the most serious problems of tragic art and human life, of the greatness and wretchedness of the human condition.6 So at first sight, the English hymn is a difficult subject to consider, and a difficult form to defend, unless one capitulates at once and agrees that the hymn is a poor relation of poetry, a limited and circumscribed art. I think that the situation is more complicated than this, both in terms of technique and text, and in terms of the way in which hymns operate in areas of important human and religious significance. One of the purposes of this book is to try to rescue the hymn from its ‘commonplace’ image; another is to see how the hymn works—what kind of a text it is, how we read or sing it, what kind of pleasure we get from it, how we interpret it; in the process it may be possible to see whether there are, in hymns, traces of the great contradictions and confusions of our fallen and redeemed nature; and to question the idea that hymns—because of their lack of irony, their apparent simplicity, and their doctrinally confined expression—are unable to represent these things with any subtlety or imaginative power.

The Power of Hymns ‘Church hymns’, wrote John Mason Neale, ‘must be the life-expression of all hearts.’7 In saying this, Neale was pointing to a sense in which hymns should be concerned with the life of the heart, using the heart as a metonymy for the whole person, spiritual, emotional, physical, the feeling and thinking human being. He was concerned, too, with all hearts, with something that can be shared by all humanity. ‘The hymn has been the poor man's poetry,’ says George Sampson, ‘the only poetry that has ever come home to his heart,’8 and one purpose of this book is to show that such

6

The phrase ‘the greatness and the wretchedness’ is from Pascal, where it is called grandeur and misére. See Michael Edwards, Towards a Christian Poetics (London, 1984), ch. 1.

7

John Mason Neale, ‘Introduction’, Hymns of the Eastern Church (London, 1862), p. xvii.

8

George Sampson, ‘The Century of Divine Songs’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 29 (1943), 37–64 (p. 37).


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heartfelt devotion may be worthy of respect, and may be based on more than just sentimental feeling. For hymns are not Christian Dogmatics, or Systematic Theology, but the expression of all the varieties of human religious experience, the dark places of the soul, the exaltation, the sense of penitence, and the sense of joy. ‘Hymns’, says Arthur Pollard, ‘form part of the literary consciousness of every Englishman, whatever his creed or sect. ’9 They are a part of popular culture, and yet also part of a religious and literary culture. There are, for example, great writers who have been profoundly affected by hymns. George Eliot begins Adam Bede with Adam in the village workshop singing Bishop Ken's morning hymn: Awake, my soul, and with the sun Thy daily stage of duty run; Dinah Morris concludes her sermon in chapter 2 of the same novel with a verse from one of Charles Wesley's hymns, ‘Thy ceaseless unexhausted love’, rich with the images of plenitude, confident in its rhetoric, and skilfully organized in rhyme and metre: Its streams the whole creation reach, So plenteous is the store, Enough for all, enough for each, Enough for evermore. And the stranger, who has been fascinated by Dinah's sermon as revealing ‘the inward drama of the speaker's emotions’, hears the singing as he passes on his way, ‘rising and falling in that strange blending of exultation and sadness which belongs to the cadence of a hymn’.10 George Eliot, who progressed from Evangelical piety to agnosticism, clearly remembered the singing of hymns and the example of preachers such as Dinah with pleasure and admiration: her love of hymns is part of a nostalgia for a time and place in her childhood when things were more simple and more certain. Some of the dearest memories of those years were of moments of beauty, in which the singing of hymns had the power to express emotions which could transfigure ordinary life into something sacramental. Elsewhere in Adam Bede, George Eliot speaks of Methodism as ‘a faith which was a rudimentary culture, which linked their thoughts with the past, lifted their imagination above the sordid details of their own narrow lives, and suffused their souls with the sense of a pitying, loving, infinite Presence, sweet as summer to the houseless needy’. And with great psychological sympathy and insight, George Eliot also reminds the reader of the way in which ordinary people, finding difficulty with the expression of deep emotion,

9

Arthur Pollard, English Hymns (London, 1960), 7.

10

George Eliot, Adam Bede (standard edn., Edinburgh, 1895), ch. 2, 29.

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use hymns to articulate their deepest feelings. Seth declares his love for Dinah by using the verse of a hymn and changing the pronoun from ‘thou’ to ‘she’: In darkest shades if she appear, My dawning is begun; She is my soul's bright morning-star, And she my rising sun.11 The problem is now, in the late twentieth century, that we think we ought to be able to do without hymns, that they are a part of the great lumber-room of religion which was cleared out by all good intellectual housekeepers long ago. Philip Larkin, remembering how the attic used to be full, spoke of religion in his last great poem as ‘That vast moth-eaten musical brocade | Created to pretend we never die’,12 and this must be a view shared by many; but, stubbornly, traditional hymns continue to persist, and to have an enduring life, even in a predominantly secular culture. Margaret Drabble's Jerusalem the Golden begins with a hymn; Iris Murdoch's The Message to the Planet ends with one. And as hymns find their place in the emotion of great occasions, so too the language of hymns seeps into ordinary speech. We know from Isaac Watts that ‘Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do’ and from Bishop Heber that ‘every prospect pleases, and only man is vile’: and the psychiatrist D. W. Winnicott describes child development thus: —one child eagerly goes on to the deeper waters, whereas another tends to lie shivering on the brink and fears to launch away.13 Readers of Isaac Watts will not need to be told that this comes from ‘There is a land of pure delight’: But timorous mortals start and shrink To cross this narrow sea, And linger, shivering on the brink, And fear to launch away. The words lingered in the mind, and gave Winnicott his means of expression: his mind was shaped by his remembrance of things past. So James Montgomery spoke of ‘those hymns, which, once heard, are remembered without effort, remembered involuntarily, yet remembered with renewed and increasing delight at every revival!’14 In the same spirit, Hardy's transition to atheism was marked by a nostalgia for the past, a wish that he might return to the simplicities of his youth, when

11

Adam Bede (standard edn., Edinburgh, 1895), ch. 3, 35, 33.

12

Philip Larkin, ‘Aubade’, Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite (London, 1988), 208.

13

D. W. Winnicott, Family and Individual Development (London, 1968), 36.

14

James Montgomery, Introductory essay, The Christian Psalmist (Glasgow, 1825), p. xv.


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On afternoons of drowsy calm We stood in the panelled pew, Singing one-voiced a Tate-and-Brady psalm To the tune of ‘Cambridge New’.15 Hardy's congregation were using one of the editions of Tate and Brady's New Version of the Psalms of David, Fitted to the Tunes Used in Churches, first published in 1696 and superseding the ‘Old Version’ of Sternhold and Hopkins. CAMBRIDGE NEW and Hardy's other tunes were, and still are, well known, such as NEW SABBATH and MOUNT EPHRAIM (in ‘A Church Romance, Mellstock: circa 1835’); so are the tunes beloved by the tragic figure of ‘The ChapelOrganist’: Yet God knows, if aught he knows ever, I loved the Old-Hundredth, Saint Stephen's, Mount Zion, New Sabbath, Miles-Lane, Holy Rest, and Arabia, and Eaton, Above all embraces of body by wooers who sought me and won!16 The recital of these names of hymn tunes (many of them still in use) is the telling-over of the names of loved ones, in a kind of ecstasy of remembering: the organist's love for the familiar tunes is intense, surpassing (as she tells us) the love of men. It is daring of Hardy to include it, but it is also something that will be recognized by all lovers of hymns. This deep affection for hymns has been described by D. H. Lawrence in one of his most attractive late essays, ‘Hymns in a Man's Life’. Mentioning a number of very great poems, he nevertheless concludes that ‘all these lovely poems woven deep into a man's consciousness, are still not woven so deep in me as the rather banal Nonconformist hymns that penetrated through and through my childhood’.17 Neither Lawrence, nor Hardy, nor George Eliot, preserved their Christian belief in any orthodox form. Yet each of them remembered the hymns of their youth, loved them, and were fascinated by their continuing appeal. Lawrence, in particular, fiercely discriminated between what he called ‘didactic and sentimental’ religious teaching, and the experience of hymn-singing, which he associated with mystery and wonder. Lawrence put his finger on one problem which, I suspect, is responsible for the contrary opinions which are held about hymns: they are often greatly loved, but they seem to have features and meanings that are reserved for the faithful, and are therefore put out of range of many who are non-believers or half-believers. They appear limited in expression and over-determined,

15

Thomas Hardy, ‘Afternoon Service at Mellstock’, The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, ed. James Gibson (London, 1976), 429.

16

Thomas Hardy, ‘The Chapel-Organist’, Complete Poems, 634.

17

D. H. Lawrence, ‘Hymns in a Man's Life’, Selected Literary Criticism, ed. A. Beal (London, 1956), 6.

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doctrinally orthodox, and essentially predictable in content; yet at the same time many of them seem to have the power to touch the hearts of ordinary men and women in remarkable and intense ways. Anyone who writes about hymns has to rejoice in their popular appeal, but also has to come to terms with the fact that hymns originate in church worship, and are primarily intended for the praise of God and for the encouragement of the faithful. Thus any criticism of hymns may be affected by the reader's attitude to the Church, and this puts the hymn into a different category from the religious poem.

Hymns in Worship Hymns belong primarily to the Church. Since the earliest years of the Christian religion, singing has played a part in Christian worship; hymns assisted in the development of the liturgy of the medieval Church, in the Reformation, and in the Evangelical Revival of the eighteenth century. Hymns permit the congregation to take part actively in a service, and provide a useful if not essential contrast with the other elements of worship. They provide verse as against prose, sound as against silence, singing as opposed to reading, standing (in most churches) as opposed to sitting. They punctuate the lessons, prayers and sermon with opportunities to be active, to stand up, sing, and express emotion and thought in words and music. They allow preachers to supplement what they have to say with hymns which contain relevant statements of doctrine, or ideas about belief: they also unite a congregation in making music and in singing the same words simultaneously. Liturgically they were important in the Reformation and after, because of the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, for whom the singing of psalms and hymns was an expression of a universal right to understand and interpret the gospel. This association of hymns with their function in worship, however, has been one of the factors that has led to their disparagement by literary critics, and their comparative neglect by students of other literary forms. There are several reasons for this. In the first place, hymns seem at times to have been appropriated exclusively for the use of those for whom they were written. They then become no longer the common property of all reading and thinking human beings, but part of a structure of belief. Many readers and critics are inclined to be open-minded about belief, and likely to prefer the probing experiments with the hymn form practised by Emily Dickinson to the hymn itself.18

18

See Charles R. Anderson, Emily Dickinson's Poetry, Stairway of Surprise (New York, 1960; Anchor Books edn., 1966), 27 ff. Anderson describes very well Emily Dickinson's expression of ‘an estranged modern religious sensibility, diminished, tangential’.


9

A second reason why hymns have been neglected by students of literature is that much writing about hymns has been done by those who have a professional interest in church worship, such as clergymen and musicians. What they have had to say has been of considerable interest, but it has inevitably concentrated on the doctrinal content of a hymn and on its usefulness for public worship, at the expense of its formal qualities. As an example of such criticism we may consider some of the work of Erik Routley, who has probably done more than anyone to keep alive the study of hymnody in English-speaking countries. Routley's numerous books, including (among others) I'll Praise My Maker (1951), Hymns Today and Tomorrow (1964), Hymns and Human Life (1952), and Hymns and the Faith (1955), contain much that is lively and perceptive; but Routley was concerned above all with the content of hymns. In Hymns and the Faith, he spoke of ‘a certain lack of balance in our interest in hymns’: Hymnology, the study of sources and history in this field, is all very well, provided it be not pursued at the expense of the contents of the hymns themselves.19 The present study is complementary to this approach; it might be described as turning Routley's sentence round on itself, and arguing that the study of the content of a hymn is all very well, provided that it does not obscure the fact that the text is the content, that the hymn should be seen as primarily a literary and musical text, image—music—text; the content is the activity of the words and music themselves. The tendency for content criticism to be the prevailing mode in the treatment of hymns may be one reason why the form has not been taken very seriously by literary critics. There is, however, another reason why this should be the case. This is the question of the treatment of the text. In the case of any poet, the text has a particular status, and its establishment and preservation is of major importance. Probably the most significant literary scholarship of the present century has been devoted to the discovery of accurate texts, corresponding as closely as possible to the poet's known intention and original version. The text of the poem is related to the respect in which the work is held: this is the authentic expression of the poet's mind, and it is thought to be worth spending much academic time and energy to get it right. In the case of hymns, on the other hand, the original text is of little account. Although John Wesley in the Preface to the 1780

19

Erik Routley, ‘Preface’, Hymns and the Faith (London, 1955), p. ix. Hymns and Human Life (London, 1952), 73–4 contains a long and fascinating comparison between Watt's ‘Alas, and did my Saviour bleed!’ and Charles Wesley's ‘O Love divine, what hast thou done?’, but based almost entirely on the content of the two hymns. Similarly, I'll Praise My Maker (London, 1951), 95, has a comment on Cowper's ‘There is a fountain fill'd with blood’ which describes it as ‘crude’, and then goes on to comment on human sin: ‘Sin is not polite or polished, and the measures which God took for its redemption were not, in earthly terms, fit for fastidious minds to contemplate.’ I do not find this helpful to an understanding of Cowper.

10


Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People Called Methodists asked people not to alter his and his brother's hymns, he had no scruples about altering and cutting those of others, among them George Herbert and Isaac Watts. And since then (citing Wesley's example as a precedent) editors of hymn-books have selected verses and altered phrases in ways which are quite contrary to the principles of textual recovery in other literary forms. The hymn text has traditionally been regarded as belonging to the Church, at the service of the editors of a hymn-book, to be altered in whatever way seems to them to be most helpful or expedient. The appalling instability of hymn texts is perhaps an inevitable consequence of the hymn's primary status as an aid to worship20 and clearly sometimes words have to be changed, such as ‘bowels’ or (more recently) ‘men’ and ‘gay’; but it may be one of the factors that has led to a refusal by many critics to take the hymn seriously as a literary form. In this book, I am attempting to do just that, acknowledging the hymn in its church function, its assumption into liturgy and worship, but also considering it apart from that function in order to see it more clearly. I wish to discuss the hymn as a literary form, to examine questions of meaning and interpretation, and to look at hymns as literary texts; and in so doing I hope, without ignoring its religious provenance and function, to give it back to the ordinary thinking and feeling human being to whom it also belongs.

Hymns, Literary Criticism, and Poetry If the Church has failed to treat the hymn with sensitivity and respect, literary critics have—with a few notable exceptions—behaved equally badly. Perhaps in displeasure at content criticism, and at the uncertain status of hymns, or just in reaction to the Church's proprietorship (and often, misuse) of hymns, literary criticism has frequently ignored them, or dismissed them as being of little account. Goldwin Smith, writing of Cowper, asserted brusquely that ‘Cowper's Olney Hymns have not any serious value as poetry. Hymns rarely have.’21 David Cecil, writing in the Preface to The Oxford Book of Christian Verse (1940), was equally dismissive: Hymns are usually a second-rate type of poetry. Composed as they are for the practical purpose of congregational singing, they do not provide a free vehicle for the expression of the poet's imagination, his intimate soul.22

20

Donald Davie has argued (Dissentient Voice (Notre Dame, Ind., 1982), 72) that we should not regret the alteration of hymn texts, ‘for when a text like this ceases to be “corrupted”, it ceases to be alive as a still germinating presence in the ongoing consciousness of the English-speaking peoples’. I would be more impressed by this argument if the texts had been altered by oral transmission, rather than by committees.

21

Goldwin Smith, Cowper (London, 1902), 42.

22

David Cecil, ‘Introduction’, The Oxford Book of Christian Verse (London, 1940), p. xxiii.


11

Here Cecil is distinguishing between two things: the restrictions caused by the demands of congregational singing, and the freedoms of the poet's inner imaginings. This suggests that the critic has in mind a particular model of the poet as a privately inspired figure, an idea which is chiefly associated with the Romantic period;23 though there are, in nearly all periods, conspicuous examples of great poetry written for public, religious, or political occasions. Cecil's problem is, perhaps, a cultural one, concerned with his antipathy to the Evangelical Revival and its forms: it is found in his life of Cowper, The Stricken Deer, where he describes Cowper as dutifully carrying out his part of ‘the bleak task’ of writing the Olney Hymns.24 Here again he contrasts the world of religion, with all its pressures on the individual to conform, with the private world of the imagination. The present book is an attempt to recover the hymn from such criticism, while avoiding such excessive raptures as Bernard Manning's praise of the Wesleys' 1780Collection: In its own way, it is perfect, unapproachable, elemental in its perfection. You cannot alter it except to mar it; it is a work of supreme devotional art by a religious genius. You may compare it with Leonardo's ‘Last Supper’ or King's Chapel—25 This absurd enthusiasm is so far from Cecil's criticism that the two minds never meet. Indeed, one of the problems of hymn criticism has been that the defenders of hymnody have preferred to ignore literary criticism, engaging in their research or their pleasures without taking the trouble to answer fundamental questions. Other studies of the English hymn have avoided the issue by being strictly chronological and historical in their coverage, without having much to say about the nature of the hymns themselves;26 while others have used hymns for other purposes, such as a commentary on changing ideas and circumstances in society and religion. Thus many studies of the English hymn, such as Lionel Adey's Hymns and the Christian

23

Compare this with C. S. Lewis, Undeceptions (London, 1971), 277: Lewis thought it ‘a great pity but a fact’ that ‘the art of poetry has developed for two centuries in a private and subjective direction—that is why I find hymns “dead wood”’. I owe the reference to Elizabeth Cosnett's unpublished MA diss. (University of Liverpool, 1975), ‘The Poet as Hymn Writer: A Study of the Hymns of George Wither, William Cowper, and Robert Bridges’.

24

David Cecil, The Stricken Deer (London, 1929), 141.

25

Bernard Manning, The Hymns of Wesley and Watts (London, 1942), 14.

26

There are a number of valuable historical studies of the English hymn, although they have little interest in the qualities of a hymn as a literary text. Louis F. Benson's The English Hymn (London, 1915) is particularly good in its completeness and its coverage of many hymn traditions from different denominations. F. J. Gillman's The Evolution of the English Hymn (London, 1927) is good on pre-Reformation hymnody, but the full treatment of early periods leaves too little room for later material. A. S. Gregory's Praises with Understanding (London, 1936) contains an intelligent discussion of hymnody, together with valuable notes on individual hymns; and C. S. Phillips's Hymnody Past and Present (London, 1937) is a treatment that ‘seeks to give an account of the development of Christian hymnody throughout the ages’. Norman P. Goldhawk's On Hymns and Hymn-Books (London, 1979) is a brief and pleasant study of the subject. Books on individual writers will be mentioned in the individual chapters.

12


‘Myth’ (1986) and his Class and Idol in the English Hymn (1989), or Susan Tamke's Make a Joyful Noise Unto the Lord (1978) are primarily concerned with the way in which the English hymn reflects social and doctrinal concerns. The present book is an attempt to make the worlds of hymnology and literary criticism meet: to look at hymns as literary texts, in the same way that Robert Alter and Frank Kermode and their colleagues have examined the Bible in The Literary Guide to the Bible, without any prejudice in favour of the hymn form over other kinds of poetry, but trying to see if a critical examination will reveal the excellences of this strange form, so apparently limited and yet so moving and popular. The one literary critic who has attempted to do this is Donald Davie, beginning with his masterly essay on Charles Wesley's vocabulary, ‘The Classicism of Charles Wesley’ in Purity of Diction in English Verse (1952), and in his subsequent books, A Gathered Church (1978) and Dissentient Voice (1982), together with his highly original Preface to The New Oxford Book of Christian Verse (1981). We should perhaps observe at this point that the public or collective sensibility of hymns ought not inevitably to be a disadvantage: there is no reason why poetry which has been written for a purpose or an occasion should be less effective than expressions of private emotion. The examples of Spenser, Milton, and (above all) of Shakespeare should make this clear, and it is only since the romantic period that we have come to value the private inspiration above the communal mode. Hymns are public verse, and addressed to God, and there is no reason why they should not be good poetry; but as George Sampson wrote, with an effective irony (not long after Cecil's remarks, and perhaps in response to them) If his [Charles Wesley's] hymns had been addressed to Pan or Apollo or some other heathen deity, or if they were written in some foreign tongue, how loud the praise would be! But alas, he addressed the Christian deity in English, and his poems are dismissed as mere hymns.27 The quotation comes from Sampson's lecture to the British Academy in 1943, entitled ‘The Century of Divine Songs’. To have lectured on hymns in the lecture space that is called the ‘Warton Lecture on English Poetry’ is significant in itself: it is evidence of Sampson's rare determination to show that hymns can be included in any account of English poetry, especially of the eighteenth century. It is only in relation to the looser and more ‘organic’ forms of poetry, prevalent in the Romantic period and after, that the hymn form may appear different and restrictive. In the same way that there is no reason why the hymn should be different from a poem written on a public occasion or for a particular audience (by, say, Spenser, or Dryden, or

27

Sampson, ‘The Century of Divine Songs’, 53.


13

Pope), so there is no reason why a hymn should not benefit, like some poems, from a predetermined structure or an organizing principle. But doubts remain, even in the minds of those who are favourably disposed towards hymns—perhaps because in some cases they have a certain deference towards poetry. In an essay entitled ‘Poetry and Hymns’, Christopher Driver has written, ‘If hymns are only pious attempts at poems, if they are to be judged by the standards we apply to poetry, they usually make rather painful reading.’ Nevertheless, he continues: Hymns primarily express an evangelical response to religious emotion. But because they have sometimes been written by people capable of a poetic response to experience, they sometimes develop the literary depth and vitality which is characteristic of the best preaching, and indeed of the Gospels themselves.28 Driver's crucial phrase is ‘a poetic response to experience’, and that phrase has serious implications for the whole question of hymnody—because what Driver is talking about is the central feature of the relationship between literature and religion, and that is the imagination. Coleridge, who was at different times both preacher and poet, would have understood Driver's phrase; indeed, he would have wished to make it more central. For Coleridge ‘a poetic response to experience’ would have been essential for the reading and exposition of the Scriptures, and for the survival of the human soul. The Statesman's Manual (1816) is a striking assertion of the power and necessity of the imaginative and sympathetic reading of Holy Scripture: neither the extreme of ‘It only means so-and-so!’, nor the other extreme of ‘It is a mystery’, but rather ‘the fellowship of the mystery of the faith as a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the KNOWLEDGE of God, the eyes of the UNDERSTANDING being enlightened’.29 Driver's ‘a poetic response to experience’ focuses attention on the language and expression involved in the creation of a religious sensibility. It is found not only in hymns but in the Bible itself, as Robert Alter has pointed out: According to one common line of thought, the Hebrew Bible exhibits certain literary embellishments and literary interludes, but those who would present ‘the Bible as Literature’ must turn it around to an odd angle from its own original emphases, which are theological, legislative, historiographic, and moral. This opposition between literature and the really serious things collapses the moment we realize that it is the exception in any culture for literary invention to be a purely aesthetic activity. Writers put together words in a certain pleasing order partly because the order pleases but also, very often, because the order helps them refine meanings, make meanings more memorable, more satisfyingly complex, so that

28

Christopher Driver, ‘Poetry and Hymns’, Congregational Quarterly, 25 (1957), 333–40.

29

S. T. Coleridge, The Statesman's Manual, in R. J. White (ed.), Lay Sermons (Collected Works of Coleridge) (London, 1972), vi. 44–6.

14


what is well wrought in language can more powerfully engage the world of events, values, human and divine ends.30 The same words might be used of the English hymn, where the words are put together in a certain order because the order helps to refine meanings, makes meanings more memorable and more satisfyingly complex. As an example, we may take a verse from a Charles Wesley hymn, ‘Come, Holy Ghost, all-quickening fire’: Eager for thee I ask and pant: So strong, the principle divine Carries me out with sweet constraint Till all my hallowed soul is thine, Plunged in the Godhead's deepest sea, And lost in thine immensity. The effect of these lines depends not just upon their content, as critics such as Routley might have suggested (and we notice that Alter speaks of ‘making meanings more memorable’); although the idea which informs the verse, that human beings are surrounded and ultimately carried away by the love and immensity of God, is a powerful one, and one that Wesley uses in other places. The effect of the lines comes from the way in which that content is expressed, and from the placing of the imagery in the lines. The verse is concerned with the loss of the self in the love of God, with the word ‘lost’ appearing in a crucial position in the last line of the verse. What is important here, however, is not just the word ‘lost’, although that draws into itself so much of the previous lines: what is so remarkable is the way in which the verse conducts the reader towards that final line. It allows the reader to follow the sense, but interrupts it sufficiently to give a certain surprise and incompleteness, only to complete the pattern at the end. The first line, by repeating what has been said before, holds the hymn still for a moment, but with a colon that gives promise of more to come, of an expansion of the meaning. That expansion is begun obliquely, with the words ‘So strong’, which hold up the forward movement again; until, like a released spring, the meaning uncoils across the next lines. The rhythms cross the lines in a beautiful movement, enacting the movement of being carried away; the reader understands something from the ‘carries me out’, but it is not made explicit—at this point the indications are of the ‘sweet constraint’ (a phrase borrowed from Shakespeare, All's Well That Ends Well) of some divine principle. Then, suddenly, the image of being carried out is completed and made explicit, with the dramatic ‘Plunged’. We can now see that the whole movement of the verse is following the sweep and

30

Robert Alter and Frank Kermode (eds.), The Literary Guide to the Bible (London, 1987), 14–15.


15

power of the sea, as the latent metaphor is revealed: the soul is like a swimmer, helplessly carried out by the current, lost, drowned, but lost wonderfully in the ocean of divine love, the immensity of God. The movement of this verse depends on an extremely skilful use of image, sound, and sense within the formal limits imposed by the stanza form. What appears at first sight to be a disadvantage, the restriction of the hymn form (Lowell's ‘quatrains shovelled out four-square’), is here used triumphantly by the craftsman. The principles and practice of this process will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 2: for the moment it will be sufficient to notice the way in which, in hymnody as in the Bible, the religious sensibility is expressed through, and is inextricable from, the language which is used. Dr Johnson, as we have seen, maintained that such language was limited, together with the subjectmatter (‘the topics of devotion are few . . . ’); so, too, are the means of expression, governed as they are by the need to be simple, clear, and singable. Yet it is through these limitations that the hymn works in the way that it does: it is because it is so circumscribed that it becomes such an interesting poetic form, containing the human and religious sensibility within its regularity, and finding within the enclosed forms a freedom of its own. This freedom comes from the recognition that language is not just the dress of thought, as eighteenth-century rhetoricians tended to think,31 and as Johnson implies when he says that ‘the sanctity of the matter rejects the ornaments of figurative diction’. The language of religion does not just deal in meanings, but—in conjunction with the reader—makes those meanings. The language of religion creates the moment of perception: Charles Wesley's image of the swimmer carried out into the fathomless sea of God's infinite love encourages the singer to feel that love as strong, irresistible, touching the person everywhere like water, drowning the singer in its immensity, so that the concept of divine love is felt, experienced, in the singing of the verse. As Mikhail Bakhtin has written: ‘Artistic form, correctly understood, does not shape already prepared and found content, but rather permits content to be found and seen for the first time.’32 It is not a question of the verse as an expression of a religious idea: it is, as Coleridge saw, essentially a process in which a literary text creates the experience itself, through the act of reading. Coleridge's clearest example of the inseparability of form and content is taken from Ezekiel chapter 1, with the vision of the chariot—‘Whithersoever the Spirit was to go, the wheels went, and thither was their spirit to go: for the spirit of the living creature was in the wheels also.’ The chariot, and that which it contains, are inseparable: Coleridge follows his quotation with:

31

See P. W. K. Stone, The Art of Poetry, 1750–1820 (London, 1967), 47 ff.

32

Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Manchester, 1984), 43.

16


The truths and the symbols that represent them move in conjunction and form the living chariot that bears up (for us) the throne of the Divine Humanity.33 The language and the experience live in each other: the hymn, and the Bible, create the understanding of God in Christ Jesus, of the workings of the Holy Spirit, of the Christian life in pilgrimage. Through a reading of the Bible, and worship, including the singing of hymns, the believer attempts to understand the created world, his or her own place in it, and the Divine relationship to both of these things. In order to do this, the reader needs language, and engages with the language of others: as Austin Farrer has written, ‘Speech opens a path to knowledge, justice, and love, and even to the notion of God himself.’34 Hymns are a part of the religious experience which they express: they help to create that experience. In so doing, they are subject to all the endless variations of human sensibility and perception: to different ideas about doctrine, to gender differences, to different conceptions about Church authority and individual salvation. In this endless variety, a variety which is as inexhaustible as humanity itself, there seems no incontrovertible reason why hymns should be thought of as narrow and restricted, or why they should be thought of as ‘a second-rate type of poetry’. They are one kind of literary text, involving what Driver calls ‘a poetic response to experience’. The forms and modes of that response will vary immensely, and it is in the language, form, and structure of hymns that the imaginative activity described by Coleridge will be found; there, and in the act of reading, or singing, and all that is implied in it.

‘The Canon’, and Some Other Critical Questions The hymn has been badly treated. Literary critics have seen it as restricted and churchy, and afflicted with what has been described (in a study of a sensitive and private poet, Emily Dickinson) as ‘a grossness of public statement’;35 the Church sees it as primarily liturgical, textually alterable, and valuable mainly for its doctrinal content. The present book is an attempt to bring about a better understanding of the hymn form on both sides: to help the Church to be aware of the distinctive and precious heritage of hymnic art which it possesses, and to remove the prejudices of literary critics who have been too easily inclined to see the hymn as a second-rate art form. Indeed, the arguments about the ‘canon’ of literature which have been taking place over the last ten years must call such judgemental approaches

33

Coleridge, The Statesman's Manual, ed. White, 29.

34

Austin Farrar, Love Almighty and Ills Unlimited (London, 1962), 110.

35

Martha Winburn England and John Sparrow, Hymns Unbidden (New York, 1966), 125.


17

to the hymn into question.36 In particular, it is important to recognize that the hymn has its roots deep in popular culture. As a number of writers have remarked, hymns are the only poetry which is known to most people; and it has been surprising that, given the interest in cultural studies, in the sociology of literature, and in working-class literature, hymns have not been given more attention. The reasons have probably been ideological ones: it has been fashionable to study popular fiction, radio programmes, or even comics, but not hymns—because they are seen as belonging to a Church culture. That Church culture is often thought of, not without some justification, as associated with a Churchand-State alliance, with middle-class values, with respectability, with psychological repression or limitation, and with an enclosed culture of an exclusive kind. I would prefer to try to see hymns as a part of this, but not necessarily affected by it: hymns can be of great value in crossing the divide between the Church and the secular world, and in their human appeal they may be said to belong to all men and women who love them, believers, half-believers, and non-believers. Hymns belong, not only to the clergy or to the Church, but to the people of God, and beyond them to all those who feel the stirrings of some religious sense, of some deeper and more poignant emotion, or some half-felt or halfunderstood apprehension of the spiritual, in the singing of well-known and much-loved hymns. It may help the understanding of the hymn as an art form, however, to recognize that it has much in common with other literary texts: that it can be read in the way that other systems of signs are read, and that it raises some of the same problems. Thus the word ‘God’ can be a floating signifier, as it is in God be in my head, and in my understanding; but more often the word is then limited in its signification to make it comprehensible and practical: God is the refuge of his saints In the second example, the sequence of words shapes the first word: the poet is wrestling with the unknown, like Jacob; and like Jacob, he tries to discover its name: the processes of hymnic discovery are those of an imagination attempting to come to terms with the great and unknowable, and struggling to find a language which will say something about the nature of God and the whole duty of man.

36

Marilyn Butler, ‘Revising the Canon’, Times Literary Supplement, 4 Dec. 1987. When Professor Butler writes that ‘it helps our modern questioning if we stand ready to readmit to the canon the little sects of dissenters, the awkward squad’, she is using the phrases metaphorically; but it has an unexpected and appropriate literalness to the readers of Isaac Watts and Philip Doddridge.

18


In the process, hymns will use a whole range of devices, including metaphor: Rock of ages cleft for me, Let me hide myself in thee; where the subject is enlivened by the mind's recognition of its ‘likeness’ to something else, and its awareness, simultaneously, of the difference;37 Charles Wesley will use the tension or apparent contradiction to produce wit: Author of faith, eternal Word, where there seems to be an element of nonsense, because an author and his word cannot be the same (except in the sense that the word represents the author's mind). Wesley is challenging assumptions about the subject, making the reader think about it afresh, surprising, and alluding. He is producing a poetic speech, a deviation from the norm which is an example of what the Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky called ‘defamiliarization’.38 Wesley is making complex art by the intricate use of the Bible: the Old and the New Testaments are, as Blake suggested, ‘the great Code of Art’,39 and nowhere more so than in hymns.

Codes, and the Interpretive Community Sometimes hymns can be densely allusive: For Judah's Lion burst his chains And crushed the serpent's head; and because of this they depend, very considerably, on the ability of the singers to interpret the code correctly. So when Stanley Fish speaks of the way in which some kind of meaning is conveyed because of an ‘interpretive community’,40 he is speaking of the way in which hymns belong to those who sing them in a particular way. They interpret the hymns, whether floating or determined, in the way they have come to understand them, almost unconsciously, in the light of doctrine, belief, and history. Hymns are sung by those people who share certain things: Bible-reading, doctrine, common prayer, and moral precept.

37

Paul Ricoeur, ‘Biblical Hermeneutics’, Semeia, 4 (1975), 94–112; quoted by Sallie McFague, Metaphorical Theology (Philadelphia, 1982), 45. Ricoeur notes ‘a tension between identity and difference’ in metaphor.

38

Victor Shklovsky, ‘Art as Technique’ (1917), repr. in David Lodge (ed.), Modern Criticism and Theory (London, 1988), 27. Shklovsky distinguished between ‘practical language’, the language of everyday use (often thought of as ‘economical’) and poetic language: in practical language, thought becomes habitual, whereas ‘the technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar” . . . Art removes objects from the automatism of perception.’

39

Northrop Frye, The Great Code (London, 1982), 80.

40

Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in this Class? (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), 171.


19

The result is sometimes a procedure which seems—from the outside—to be circular: congregations sing because of what they believe, and believe because of what they sing: Like a mighty army Moves the church of God; Brothers, we are treading Where the saints have trod. We are not divided, All one body we,— This looks disagreeably like the interpretive community admiring itself in a mirror; and if that mirror is distorted, or unduly flattering, as it seems to be here, then the result is an art which brings the Church and the hymn into disrepute. At other times, the collegiality which is reflected in hymn-writing is helpful: not only in the shared codes from the Bible and the Church Fathers, but from the intertextuality of hymn-writing. Each hymn is a new and unique way of putting things, but it is often the old way slightly altered: hymns exist in hymn-books as separate works, though often having a family resemblance to one another—sharing the same metre, borrowing phrases from one another, paraphrasing the same psalm or biblical chapter, sharing tunes. The discourse of a hymn is a shared speech, and a conversation with other hymns: going through a section in a hymn-book (on, say, the Holy Spirit) is a little like eavesdropping on a seminar, in which each voice has something to contribute, and in which each hymn is conscious of the others and relates to them. This process is affected, however, by the variations of hermeneutical interpretation. Hymns themselves are hermeneutical acts, reinterpreting scripture in accordance with the needs of their time; and current readings of hymns are thus secondary hermeneutical acts, as informed or uninformed as we care to make them. A full understanding of a hymn requires a complex awareness of the way in which hymns function in worship today, and have their origins in the worship of yesterday. A contemporary reading may well concentrate on the text, but the danger of this is that it will become a private reading or singing, an example of what Heidegger called the hermeneutical circle, in which the interpreter gets from the text what he or she brings to it.41 To counter this, it is necessary to attempt some kind of historicism, to set the hymn in the context of its original production, if only because this involves not individual response but understanding. It is helpful, for example, to see the hymnody of Addison, Watts, or Doddridge in terms of the philosophical ideas of their age: the scientific discoveries of

41

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, quoted by Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York, 1975), 148.

20


Boyle and Newton, the establishment of a constitutional monarchy and of religious toleration, and the rise of mercantilism. These things are more important than the personalia which are often offered as a background to a writer's hymns. This book traces the history of the English hymn since the Reformation, not as the work of a series of individuals, but as expressions of the religious temper of certain times, and as literary texts. It needs to acknowledge two things at the outset. The first is the enormous range of hymnody. When Johnson thought of hymnody as having a ‘paucity of topics’, he clearly did not appreciate that hymns could refer to the whole of the Bible and to Christian doctrine, and—even more significantly—to the never-ending movements of the human soul. The psalms, as we shall see, were valued precisely because they were, in Calvin's words, ‘the Anatomy of all parts of the soul’;42 and from the singing of metrical psalms developed the wide spectrum of English hymnody. The second is the fact the hymns are sung. This has very important implications for the form of a hymn, and these will be discussed in the next chapter, which is concerned with rhyme and metre. We may also note at this point, however, that the singing of hymns produces a complex interaction between the author and the singer, which often makes it very difficult to identify the ‘I’ or ‘we’ of a hymn text. When we sing Dark and cheerless is the morn Unaccompanied by thee; Joyless is the day's return, Till thy mercy's beams I see; Till they inward light impart, Glad my eyes and warm my heart we can appreciate that the ‘I’ here may be Charles Wesley, or the singing self, or someone else singing (with more, or less, conviction), or the shared ‘I’ of a congregation singing. The voice of a hymn is an example of Foucault's idea that ‘all discourses endowed with the author-function’ possess a ‘plurality of self ’.43 And with the plurality of self, there is inevitably a plurality of interpretation. Hymns combine a strict discipline of form with a surprisingly open discourse. They also provide an opportunity—perhaps a unique opportunity at this time—of repeating and memorizing a familiar text. Singing a hymn, again and again, over the years, means that the text becomes lodged in the memory, captured, experienced and re-experienced, sometimes with a new awareness or a deeper sensibility. It is akin to the ancient art of

42

John Calvin, A Commentary on the Psalms, trans. Arthur Golding, rev. T. H. L. Parker (London, 1965), 16.

43

Michael Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, repr. in Josue V. Harari (ed.), Textual Strategies (London, 1979).


21

recitation, and involves the use of memory. ‘To learn by heart’, writes George Steiner, ‘is to afford the text or music an indwelling clarity and life-force’: Accurate recollection and resort in remembrance not only deepen our grasp of the work: they generate a shaping reciprocity between ourselves and that which the heart knows.44 ‘Poetics must begin with genre’, said Bakhtin;45 and in this first chapter I have endeavoured to explore some of the characteristics and problems of the hymn genre. In some ways it is like any literary text: it functions as a sign-system, and can have an indeterminacy and instability; it is particularly unstable in its subject-function, which is associated with the author-function but transcends it; and it is heavily dependent on the response of the individual reader. But the special characteristics of its genre are a stability which comes from its use of consistent codes, especially the great code of the Bible; and a firmness of reader-response which comes from the interpretive community of the Church. To these must be added the fact that hymns are sung, with all the demands which that makes upon form, metre, and content. This is the subject of the next chapter.

44

George Steiner, Real Presences (London, 1989), 9.

45

Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle (Minneapolis, 1984), 80.

2 The Singing of Hymns, and the Experience of Metre The Begynner Of Meter Was God

Reading/singing The argument of the previous chapter has been based on the idea that hymns may be considered as literary texts; but they are texts of a rather peculiar kind. There are two completely different ways of dealing with them. One is to use them for private reading, for study and devotion, in which case the reader can pause, stop and think, look up a reference, pray, and come back to a line again. The other is to sing them in church, in which case there can be no stopping: the singer becomes part of a group process, engaged, committed, the vocalized ‘I’ or ‘we’ of the hymn becoming part of the involvement with public worship. In that process the tune and metre become crucially important. Hymns are, more obviously than most poetry, image—music—text. They exist to be sung to certain tunes, and sometimes a particular hymn will become indissolubly wedded to its tune—so that, as I write the quotations in these chapters, I sing them in my mind.46 The music changes the nature of the words: it makes them ‘sound’, not just in the normal way in which words make a sound, but in resonance with the music, creating a musical and verbal texture. The music has its own ways of imposing pauses, fluidity, emphasis, structure upon the words: the mind has to combine an appreciation of syntax and sentence with another appreciation of movement through and in the musical notation. Punctuation, too, becomes important: Isaac Watts, for example, counted his stops as a musician would do: A comma divides betwixt all the lesser parts of the same sentence, and directs us to rest while we can tell two; . . . A semicolon separates betwixt the bigger parts or branches of the same sentence, and directs us to rest while we can tell three; . . . A

46

Edward FitzGerald said that he ‘heard’ Shakespeare as he read it. See Eric Griffiths, The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry (Oxford, 1989), 1.

THE SINGING OF HYMNS

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period, or full stop . . . requires us to rest while we can tell five or six, if the sentence be long; or while we can tell four, if it be short.47 A hymn exists, not just on the page, but in sound; it functions in a private reading, but also in a church. The building is filled with sound, made by musical instruments and human voices, and the text becomes no longer the marks on the page but a series of sounds in the air. It may be revisited later, and reflected upon, but it is no longer just a text, no longer writing, but something else in addition to writing. In the sense that it exists in a book, and that book may be held in the hand and read, the hymn is there as writing; but it is only there because it is also music, sacred song, congregational praise. Through music, the words sing; as the Danish hymn-writer N. F. S. Grundtvig said, hymn singing awakens the soul, because ‘sound is the life of the Word and tone is the power of sound which reveals the Spirit’.48 Speech becomes song, and song a kind of religious speech, as Ben Jonson suggested: But now I'le raise againe my drooping head. And singing say, and saying sing for ever,—49 In congregational worship the text exists, often inextricably united to the music, in a way which takes it off the page and back towards speech, towards what Jacques Derrida calls ‘phonocentrism’. In Of Grammatology, Derrida devotes considerable attention to matters of writing and speech, referring particularly to the theories of Rousseau, Saussure, and Levi-Strauss, all of whom stress the primary and natural quality of speech and contrast it with the secondary form of writing. These ideas are called into question by Derrida, who sees, interestingly for the present purpose, a much more problematic relationship between speech and writing than that proposed by the anthropologists' idea of writing as an insufficient and superimposed substitute for ‘natural’ speech. Derrida's scepticism, which places both speech and writing in the position of insufficiency, where the signs are not just different from one another (as in Saussure) but lead to endlessly deferred meanings, is in strong contrast to Rousseau's romanticism, with its belief in the superiority of the natural. In the writing/singing of hymns, however, Derrida's idea of ‘the unstable

47

Isaac Watts, The Art of Reading and Writing English, in George Burder (ed.), The Works of Isaac Watts (London, 1810), iv. 695.

48

From a sermon by Grundtvig, Christmas Day, 1822; quoted in Christian Thodberg, ‘Grundtvig the Hymnwriter’, in Christian Thodberg and Anders Pontoppidan Thyssen (eds.), N. F. S. Grundtvig, Tradition and Renewal, trans. Edward Broadbridge (Copenhagen, 1983), 166.

49

See Ch. 6, ‘John Cosin’, 85.

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relationship between couplets such as speech/writing’50 is one which corresponds to the protean adaptability and changeability of a hymn text. That text exists in a book, in one form: chameleon-like, it exists in the same shape, but in another, modified, sense in other books, because of the company it keeps; and it exists, too, and perhaps most ‘naturally’, in the moments when it is sung by a congregation. Then it becomes once again speech, the sound made by the mouth and breath, the expression of the lungs and the body. It becomes, in Derrida's summary of Rousseau, ‘not grammatological but pneumatological’.51 It becomes, too, a congregational song made by individuals, each of whom may be interpreting the text in his or her own way; and that interpretation may vary from time to time, or with different circumstances. In hymnody, there would be no writing without singing, and there would be no singing without writing. Frequently hymn-writers compose their words for a specific tune, which they hear in their minds as they write. In these cases, the tune exists before the hymn: the hymn is then written down, chosen, given its place in the hymn-book. It then comes off the page again, as the organist plays the first lines in introduction: the congregation stands, breathes, sings, makes sounds together. The writing comes off the page, back into the body, lungs, blood; where there was silence, or singleperson word-speech (prayer, lesson, sermon) there is now plurivocal/univocal sound, individual singing joining in one. It is a model of universal harmony: The whole creation join in one To bless the sacred name Of him that sits upon the throne, And to adore the Lamb. Isaac Watts's vision, from Revelation 5: 11–13, is one which extends the ideal of congregational singing to the whole created world: in the process speech and writing become one, distinctions lost in the physical, natural, pneumatological processes of singing the writing.

Metrics One of the consequences of this is the need for the strict observation of metre. Apart from a small number of irregular hymns, the regularity of metre is properly observed: like the Serbian reciter of peasant poetry described by Jakobson, the hymn-singer notices and repudiates any infringements

50

See Raman Selden, A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory (Sussex, 1985), 87.

51

Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London, 1976), 17.


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of the rules.52 Routley used this regularity to question the claim of hymnody to be poetry: There is a level beyond which literature cannot rise if it is to be good hymnody. The most obvious restraint on poetic inspiration and technique is the need, in a hymn, to use regular stresses, which gives its text, in the reading, a sing-song monotony which no master of poetry would tolerate in his verse for a moment.53 Against this may be set T. S. Eliot's essay ‘Reflections on Vers libre’: The most interesting verse which has yet been written in our language has been done either by taking a very simple form, like the iambic pentameter, and constantly withdrawing from it, or taking no form at all, and constantly approximating to a very simple one. It is this contrast between fixity and flux, this unperceived evasion of monotony, which is the very life of verse.54 The rhythmical practice of the best hymn-writers is highly sophisticated, for they use the stress patterns of the tune and metre to provide a strong base, on which they build in subtle and sensitive ways. The firmness of the metrical structure is invariably modified, because words and phrases make their own demands, and are handled in ways which make them ‘play’ against the initial rhythm and metrical pattern. In most mainstream hymnody the combination of flexible treatment and firm metre is effective and powerful: Begin, my tongue, some heavenly theme; Awake, my voice, and sing The mighty works, or mightier name, Of our eternal King. Isaac Watts begins this verse with a statement, and supplements it in line 2 with a parallel statement; but at the end of line 2 the reader/singer discovers that there is a predicate to come after ‘sing’, so that line 2, which looked like a parallel, turns out to be the beginning of another unit of meaning, in which the sense sweeps on to the end of the verse, building up through ‘mighty . . . mightier’ to ‘eternal King’. In four lines the transition has been made from human properties, tongue and voice, to the greatness and timelessness of God, and the process is achieved partly through the syntax and its relationship to the metre. It is noticeable, too, how the pauses in lines 1 and 2 hold the singer back with commas and semicolons, until, with the word ‘sing’ (followed by the unexpected enjambement) the verse gathers momentum (sustained by yet another run-on between lines 3 and 4), as if it had been waiting to be released.

52

Roman Jakobson, ‘Linguistics and Poetics’, repr. in David Lodge (ed.), Modern Criticism and Theory (London, 1988), 44.

53

Erik Routley, ‘Preface’, A Panorama of Christian Hymnody (Collegeville, Minn., 1979), p. v.

54

T. S. Eliot, ‘Reflections on Vers libre’, in John Hayward (ed.), Selected Prose (Harmondsworth, 1953), 88–9.

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It is arguable, indeed, that the metrical basis of hymns can increase the poet's possibilities rather than limit them. Ted Hughes once said: I think it's true that formal patterning of the actual movement of verse somehow includes a mathematical and a musically deeper world than free verse can easily hope to enter. It's a mystery why it should be so. But it only works of course if the language is totally alive and pure and if the writer has a perfectly pure grasp of his real feeling . . . and the very sound of metre calls up the ghosts of the past and it is difficult to sing one's own tune against that choir.55 The presence of a strong metre may actually be an advantage: hymns may be likened in this respect to ballads, where the dramatic scenes take place against a regular patterning of verse stanzas, the powerful rhythms of primitive or folk art. A congregation feels this through its singing. In this the characteristic movement of a hymn is through a series of verses: the music begins, the congregation sings four, or six, or eight lines, and then stops; then begins again, the same notes but different words; then again, and again; the tune is repeated, the words are (usually) changed. The tune is something which is returned to, several times, begun again each time: it comes to rest, often on a major chord, followed by a momentary silence, and then the singers go back to the beginning. The words carry on, are linear; the tune is circular. The circles are repeated, but the words change: the direction of the hymn becomes clear, the structure unfolds, and then the last verse brings it to a conclusion. Each verse-ending is a punctuation mark, regularly placed. Hymn singing is thus a rhythmical activity, picking up the rhythm from the first verse and then repeating it, but repeating it with variations of pace, emphasis, and volume. Each verse has its own shape and form, which the singer feels before coming to a stop at line four, or six, or eight. Then, after a moment, the next verse begins: Jesu, thou joy of loving hearts, Thou fount of life, thou light of men, From the best bliss which earth imparts We turn unfilled to thee again. Thy truth unchanged hath ever stood; Thou savest those that on thee call; To them that seek thee thou art good, To them that find thee, all in all.

55

Ted Hughes, interviewed by Ekbert Faas; see Faas, The Unaccommodated Universe (Santa Barbara, Calif., 1980), 208. The idea has something in common with the sense of meter as God-given, part of a mysterious universal rhythm: ‘The begynner of meter was God, whych proporcioned the world, with all the contents of the same, with a certain order as it were a meter . . . ’ (Polydore Vergil, An Abridgement of the notable worke . . . conteynyng the devisers of Artes, Ministeries, etc., abridged by Thomas Langley, 1546; quoted by C. A. Patrides, Introduction to The English Poems of George Herbert (London, 1974), 15).


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The four lines have a variable syntax which makes in both cases a particularly effective musical/verbal unit, coming to rest at the end of the fourth line. Then, after a pause, the hymn begins again, with different words: the words parallel those of the first verse, develop the ideas, running the same tune again, so that words and music form a kind of theme and variations, the theme (tune, rhythm, first verse) being present while the second verse works a variation upon it. The metrics become a regular foundation, a recurring stability upon which the developing hymn can be built; the verse design determines the invariant features of the work, and sets limits to the variations. In the process of deciding what a hymn is and how it works, these combinations of musical notation and poetic diction are vital. So are the syntax, word order, and punctuation. There are three elements which contribute significantly to the effect: the relation of the smallest unit of speech in the hymn, the word or syllable, to the line; the placing of the line, or lines, within the verse; and the organization of the verses within the hymn as a whole. When a hymn is written out on the page, it is possible to see these features, set out and held as writing, though beginning as speech and set out so that it might become speech again. Strangely, hymns that are written out as if they were to be sung, with the words printed between the musical staves, seem to prevent the hymn from being seen as it should be seen: Routley is correct when he says that it is ‘a practice which makes it impossible to read the text as it should be read’.56 He does not say why this should be so, but I think that the reason must be that it obscures the shape and structure of the hymn. It prevents the reader from engaging with what John Crowe Ransom called ‘the meter-and-meaning process’.57

Words and Lines A strong first line not only signals the beginning of the work, but it calls the congregation to attention, and it demands a reader/singer's respect. John Mason Neale, for example, was successful with ‘Jerusalem the Golden’, but had a failure with ‘Those eternal bowers | Man hath never trod’. The former has a regular pace and measure through its seven syllables, a measure which actually increases the awareness of a dignity in the word ‘Jerusalem’ and gives an almost even weight to its four syllables. After it comes the apparently unimportant ‘the’, unstressed; yet it is the word which holds the line together, and enables the beat to be right. It effects

56

Routley, A Panorama of Christian Hymnody, p. v.

57

John Crowe Ransom, ‘Wanted: An Ontological Critic’, in Beating the Bushes: Selected Essays 1941–1970 (New York, 1972), 14. This whole essay is of interest in its discussion of metrics and stanza forms; see also Ransom's remarks on the poem's ‘artful and spatial design upon the flat plane of the paper’ in Selected Poems (3rd edn., New York, 1978), 128.

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the transition between ‘Jerusalem’ and ‘golden’, another word which is given full weight and value by being placed thus at the end of the line. Another memorable first line is ‘Rock of Ages, cleft for me’, which again has seven syllables. Here the stresses fall strongly on the alternate syllables, making four heavy beats, with one at each end of the line. There are also four strong words, ‘Rock . . . Ages . . . cleft . . . me’, held together by two unstressed but crucial ones, ‘of ’ and ‘for’. The strength comes from the accommodation of the sense and syntax to the rhythm and length of the line, in each case an arresting address to something followed by a qualification of it, in a 4 + 3 pattern. Slightly different, though still with seven syllables, is Charles Wesley's Christ, whose glory fills the skies— We could say, I think, that if Christ's glory fills the skies, here it also fills the line. Certainly every word has its part to play in producing the effect; and the stresses which are set up in reading or singing are crucial. There are four ‘loadbearing’ words, supported by two less important but still necessary ones, ‘whose’ and ‘the’. At either end of the line are ‘Christ’ and ‘skies’, the balancing ‘I’ sounds calling to each other across the middle of the line; and in the very centre are the two words ‘glory fills’, where the verb ‘fills’ comes, at first reading, as something of a surprise, a surprise which is triumphantly vindicated with the last word ‘skies’, for ‘fills the skies’ is an image which is abundant in meaning (are the skies filled with light? stars? sound? wind? air? space?—with light above all, perhaps, but with all of these, and more). We may find the same kind of superb accommodation of the words to the line shape in Timothy Dudley-Smith's Tell out, my soul, the greatness of the Lord which is a quotation from the Magnificat in the New English Bible version. I suspect that in that line Dudley-Smith provided the detonator for what has been called the ‘hymn explosion’ of the last forty years; we shall never know what might have been, but it is possible to speculate that if he had not realized the strength of these words as a hymn line, a pentameter rich with the pauses and rhythms of ordinary speech, and yet also distinctive in its diction (‘Tell out’ suggests a bell), shape and command, others would not have been inspired to write modern hymns. Again and again such first lines announce something, call for attention, signal the beginning of something meaningful: and once again there is a parallel with folk art, for when the bard, or scop, began Beowulf he began with ‘Hwaet’ to summon attention. So the hymn-writer will begin with ‘Hark’, or ‘Awake’, or ‘Behold’. These are all in the imperative mood (the prayer-imperative), and a long essay might be written on the use of imperatives


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in the opening lines of hymns—‘Come’, or ‘Praise’, or ‘Sing’ are very common. This is one kind of opening line. Another is the one which begins with ‘God’, or ‘Jesu’, or ‘Christ’, or ‘Spirit’, which in various ways and to different degrees are floating signifiers, given direction and point by what follows: Jesu, lover of my soul— God is a name my soul adores— Spirit divine, attend our prayers— In these cases the evoking of the Holy Name is intended to arouse the kind of alert attention which a hymn requires. At other times, the attention is gained by addressing the self in a metonymy, placed immediately after the imperative: Sing, my tongue, the glorious battle— Praise, my soul, the king of heaven— Awake, my soul, and with the sun— or by addressing God, Jesus, or the Holy Spirit: See, Jesus, thy disciples see— Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire— O God, our help in ages past— These patterns may be discerned horizontally within the individual line, but of course a line depends on other lines: just as a word is understood in context, so a line is given character, meaning, and strength not only by its structure but by its relationship to those lines which surround it. In the case of first lines, the following lines direct the meaning, or supplement it; this is particularly the case when the first line is an adverbial clause: When I survey the wondrous cross— While shepherds watched their flocks by night— As with gladness men of old— These are less commanding first lines than those which contain imperatives or addresses: for the full effect, the reader/ singer has in these cases to wait until the second line, or even the whole verse. Similarly the beauty of a line such as Abide with me; fast falls the eventide;— is not fully revealed until it has been juxtaposed to the second line, with which it makes a most graceful chiasmus:

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Abide with me; fast falls the eventide; The darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide— Here the alliteration of ‘fast falls’ balances that of ‘darkness deepens’, and between them is a middle point, ‘eventide’. The outside balance is provided by ‘Abide with me’ and ‘with me abide’, and the couplet, in its deviations from the norm, is most delicately balanced in its structure. The meaning of the hymn becomes the repeated cry for help and sustaining love in the eventide of life, a delicate crossing of meaning between the awareness of a deepening darkness and the cry of the soul for God.

Lines and Verses: The Uses of Rhyme The pattern of a line is part of the larger pattern which is the verse. James Montgomery described it as a rivulet ‘falling into the general stream’ of the verse: The syllables in every division ought to ‘ripple like a rivulet’, one producing another as its natural effect, while the rhythm of each line, falling into the general stream at the proper place, should cause the verse to flow in progressive melody, deepening and expanding like a river to the close; or, to change the figure, each stanza should be a poetical tune, played down to the last note.58 In considering effects such as this, we need to examine the placing of the lines within the verses. Hymn verses are arranged with necessary regularity, and once a verse form has been chosen it cannot be changed (there are exceptions to this rule, but it is true of most hymns). The material of the second and subsequent verses therefore has to be made to fit into the pattern established by the first one: it is the opposite to the idea of ‘organic form’, in which the material dictates the shape of the poem.59 In hymns, the shape of the verse is there, and the material has to be accommodated to it. It involves some subtle verbal engineering, especially because rhyme is often involved. Charles Tomlinson's poem, ‘The Chances of Rhyme’, reminds us of the problem: The chances of rhyme are like the chances of meeting— In the finding fortuitous, but once found, binding:—60 So in hymn texts the rhyme scheme and metre of the first stanza are, once established, binding. J. S. B. Monsell discovered this when he locked

58

James Montgomery, Introductory essay, The Christian Psalmist (Glasgow, 1825), pp. xvi–xvii.

59

See Herbert Read, The True Voice of Feeling (London, 1947), 21: ‘The form of a work of art is inherent in the emotional situation of the artist . . . It resists or rejects all attempts to fit the situation to a ready-made formula of expression . . . ’. Read distinguishes between what he calls ‘organic form’, or this natural form, and ‘received form’.

60

Charles Tomlinson, ‘The Chances of Rhyme’, in Selected Poems, 1951–1974 (Oxford, 1978), 109.


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himself in to a Hardyesque 13 10. 13 10. metre, following a marvellous first line: O worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness Good rhyming involves more than just sticking words with similar vowel sounds at the end of lines. As Gerard Manley Hopkins observed, ‘There are two elements in the beauty rhyme has to the mind, the likeness or sameness of sound and the unlikeness or difference of meaning.’61 Rhyme can be spectacular, and draw attention to itself: Lord thy word abideth, And our footsteps guideth; Who its truth believeth Light and joy receiveth. The ‘meaning’ of this hymn comes through the assertive rhymes and the short lines, which boldly remind us that the word of God abides and guides, that to believe is to receive. All four words are verbs, similar in sound and connected in sense. The meaning is in the echoing sounds: it is a rhymer's way of seeing the gospel. Similarly Charles Wesley will use his rhymes, especially in couplet forms, to shape the idea: Lord, that I may learn of thee, Give me true simplicity; Wean my soul, and keep it low, Willing thee alone to know— Here the rhymes are more sharply contrasted, so that the short ‘thee’ rhymes with the final syllable (only) of the long word ‘simplicity’—a word which in the reading or singing has to be drawn out to its full length across the four syllables, as if the reader were ‘spelling it out’ in the manner of someone learning to read. The verses are also intent upon the contrast between the self and the other: God, the teacher, is ‘thee’, and the human learner needs ‘true simplicity’. Only by being ‘low’ will he come to ‘know’. Even more remarkable is the daring verse from Wesley's ‘Earth, rejoice, our Lord is King!’, with its reference to Elisha's vision in 2 Kings 6: 15–17: Lo, to faith's enlightened sight, All the mountain flames with light! Hell is nigh, but God is nigher, Circling us with hosts of fire. Here the rhyme word ‘nigher’, unusual both in itself and its placing, throws the attention on to the important contrast between hell and God, signalled

61

The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Humphry House and Graham Storey (London, 1959), 286.

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by the surprising use of an adverb and its comparative—nigh/nigher; and ‘nigher’ is given more prominence by being such a surprising, yet possible, rhyme for ‘fire’, which (to be a correct rhyme) would need to be pronounced ‘fiyer’. Charles Wesley is doing violence to customary grammar and phonetics; the reader's hearing, sense of normal grammar, and imagination register this, protest, and then capitulate: they see that there is a justification for such liberties with sound and syntax—indeed that those very liberties add the interest to language, and also draw attention to the spiritual insight which it is Charles Wesley's purpose to communicate. Certain metres are particularly frequent. They are 86.86., or Common Metre (C.M.), 66.86., or Short Metre (S.M.), and 88.88., or Long Metre (L.M.). Almost always lines 2 and 4 rhyme; sometimes lines 1 and 3 rhyme as well. Each of the forms has its own character, which shapes the material and becomes part of the meaning. In S.M., for instance, doctrine is stated with brevity and simplicity: Blest are the pure in heart, For they shall see our God: The secret of the Lord is theirs; Their soul is Christ's abode. Short Metre specializes in the sharp, neat, well-focused use of biblical texts: How beauteous are their feet Who stand on Zion's hill! Who bring salvation on their tongues, And words of peace reveal! These lines are a brisk abbreviation of Isaiah 52: 7: ‘How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace; that bringeth good tidings of good, that publisheth salvation; that saith unto Zion, Thy God reigneth!’ Isaac Watts has retained the essentials and cut the parallelisms: he has sacrificed a technique of Hebrew poetry to gain an English verse. The loss of repetition has meant an immeasurable gain in sharpness. Common Metre (86.86.) has only two syllables more than S.M. (in line 1), but that extra foot make a vast difference. Instead of the opening 66 pattern, which encourages the ear to accept brief and uncomplicated statements, the 86 metre of lines 1 and 2 in C.M. allows a much more flexible and expansive pattern: Hark the glad sound! the Saviour comes, The Saviour promised long; Let every heart prepare a throne, And every voice a song. He comes the prisoners to release, In Satan's bondage held;


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The gates of brass before him burst, The iron fetters yield. Philip Doddridge here uses the 86.86. metre in two-line units, with a strong caesura at the end of line 2. Throughout the hymn (normally four verses long, though originally it had seven) the verses are broken like this at the end of line 2, either with a semicolon or a heavy comma. This is perhaps because the C.M. stanza developed not only from the ballad stanza, but also from the old ‘fourteener’ couplet, printed as four lines instead of two for typographical convenience. It is particularly suited to a metrical parallelism. Again and again the central punctuation mark, at the end of line 2, is a semicolon. It is a reworking of the Old Testament idea of parallelism, the ‘correspondence of one verse, or line, with another’, which Robert Lowth perceived to be the central principle of Hebrew poetics.62 The flexibility of the ancient practice of parallelism would appear to be restricted by its transformation into the metrical regularity of 86.86., but in the hands of a skilful hymn-writer it survives remarkably well. Long Metre, 88.88., is very different in character. By lengthening the two shorter lines by one foot (or two syllables), it changes the whole range of possibilities, because each line is now long enough to take a proposition by itself: For why, the Lord our God is good; His mercy is for ever sure; His truth at all times firmly stood, And shall from age to age endure. Each of these lines contains a main verb, and could (except for the last one) stand by itself. A similar pattern is found in J. S. B. Monsell's Sing to the Lord a joyful song, Lift up your hearts, your voices raise; To us his gracious gifts belong, To him our songs of love and praise. Monsell has a semicolon at the end of line 2, as in the C.M. pattern, and this is still common in L.M. But the chief glory of L.M. is its ability to carry sustained units of speech, so that the verses can develop and amplify ideas. In the following example, each line makes some sense by itself, and yet the four lines are a continuous whole: Ready for all thy perfect will, My acts of faith and love repeat, Till death thy endless mercies seal, And make the sacrifice complete.

62

Quoted in Stephen Prickett, Words and the Word (Cambridge, 1986), 109.

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Here we notice again Charles Wesley's extraordinary ability at matching the sense to the verse form. The unexpected trochee of ‘Ready’ surprises and avoids monotony, but then the stanza works through to a totality of experience in life and death. The line, and the verse, and the idea, and the sacrifice, are all ‘complete’ at the end of the fourth line. Each of these metres, S.M., C.M., and L.M., can be used in double form, making stanzas of eight lines; and the choice of printing in four- or eight-line units affects the reading of the text. ‘Soldiers of Christ, arise’ is a very different hymn when it is sung, as it was originally written, in Double Short Metre, to E. W. Naylor's FROM STRENGTH TO STRENGTH. This tune dates from 1902; before that W. H. Monk, the musical editor of Hymns Ancient and Modern, had composed ST ETHELWALD so that Charles Wesley's hymn could be included in the first edition of 1861. ST ETHELWALD is a four-line tune, and breaks up the hymn into short verses: when it is printed thus, it will be seen that the ends of verses 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, and so on, are marked by a colon or semicolon, leading on to the next verse. Monk's tune, though a fine one, divides the hymn where it should not be divided, and produces a kind of stopping and starting rhythm. A similar case of such double/single metre is found in the popular 8.7.8.7. metre, used in double form for such hymns in eight-line verses as ‘Glorious things of thee are spoken’ (unlike S.M., C.M., and L.M., this is basically trochaic). In this metre is Charles Wesley's ‘Love divine, all loves excelling’, which was originally written for a beautiful Purcell opera tune (‘Fairest Isle’, from King Arthur). In the twentieth century (c. 1904–5) BLAENWERN was composed, and this tune carries the words with great force, as HYFRYDOL also does. In between came Stainer's fine four-line tune, LOVE DIVINE, set to this hymn in the 1889 Supplement to the 1875 edition of Hymns Ancient and Modern, and in this form the hymn was adopted by the Church of England. The four-line verses break up the original hymn into a different shape, in which the units (verses) become six and not three: each becomes one-sixth of the whole. There is some justification for this in verses 1 and 2 of the text as we have it (there was originally another verse 2, now rarely printed) because each verse has a full stop at the end of line 4; but the hymn of three eight-line verses encourages a continuity of thought and movement. It also suggests a division of the hymn into three parts, corresponding to the three major imperatives: Fix in us thy humble dwelling— Come, almighty to deliver— Finish then thy new creation— Consideration of these stanza forms helps to show how an alteration of verse form can affect the hymn, alter its shape, and become a part of its


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meaning. The shortest forms, such as Fred Pratt Green's 5.5.5.4., work by flashes of imagery: After darkness, light; After winter, spring; After dying, life: Alleluia! 6.5.6.5., a little more expanded, is like C.M., in that it is often divided by a heavy caesura at the end of line 2, although the short line keeps it simpler, and it is trochaic: Jesus, stand among us In thy risen power; Let this time of worship Be a hallowed hour. It is interesting to see what happens to such six-syllable lines when they are linked to much longer ones, as in 6.6.11.D.: Come down, O Love divine, Seek thou this soul of mine, And visit it with thine own ardour glowing; O Comforter, draw near, Within my heart appear, And kindle it, thy holy flame bestowing. Here the short lines are preliminary prayer-imperatives, leading on through the crucial ‘And’s to the stronger imperatives in the long lines. The two short lines chime, holding the syntax tightly and with a firm rhythm, only to let it flow freely in lines 3 and 6—which also chime, in counterpoint to the couplet rhymes. 7.7.7.7. has already been briefly exemplified in ‘Earth, rejoice, our Lord is king’, with its remarkable ‘Hell is nigh, but God is nigher’: 7.7.7.7.7.7. can be very different: As with gladness men of old Did the guiding star behold, As with joy they hailed its light, Leading onward, beaming bright, So, most gracious Lord, may we Evermore be led to thee. As opposed to these tightly-constructed rhyming couplets, there are the freer and more flexible stanza forms of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Richard Baxter's ‘Ye holy angels bright’ uses the metre of the 148th Psalm in The Whole Booke of Psalmes (1562), which begins with 6.6.6.6., rhyming ABAB, and then moves into 4.4.4.4., delightfully rhyming CDDC. The verse form is exploited to provide one long, complicated, joyous, energetic sentence:

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Ye holy angels bright, Who wait at God's right hand, Or through the realms of light Fly at your Lord's command, Assist our song, Or else the theme Too high doth seem For mortal tongue. A consideration of these metrical effects, and a study of the commonest verse forms, suggests that the hymn text works through the metrical employment of syntax and imagery, and the pleasure of the text is found in the interaction of all these things, and especially the way in which the complexities of what the poet needs to say—theological, expressive, penitential, exultant, biblical—are fitted in to the rhythmical and metrical structure, and expressed through the rhymes. The line-endings are important, too, in conveying the sense of single phrases or images: In the bleak mid-winter Frosty wind made moan, Earth stood hard as iron, Water like a stone; Snow had fallen, snow on snow, Snow on snow,— The recurrence in the verse form begets a recurrence in the words or thought: the repetition of images, each accommodated in one of the slightly irregular lines, suggests repeated cold, repeated frost, repeated snow. The short, separated lines allow the sense of layer upon layer to build up through simile and description, even as the snow itself builds up in layers. It is quite different in impression from a long-lined hymn: Eternal ruler of the ceaseless round, Of circling planets singing on their way— This hymn, written in 10 10. 10 10. 10 10. and sung to Orlando Gibbons's SONG 1, is a reminder of how rare such pentameters are in English hymnody, as opposed to secular poetry. Hymn metres tend to be variations on a pattern which is closer to octosyllabic norms; and frequently, if ten-syllable lines are used, their length is relieved by mixing them with shorter lines, as in ‘For all the saints’, or ‘Lead, kindly light’.

Verses and Hymns Hymns use verses to make up their structure. The verses stand in descending order on the page, surrounded by the white spaces around and between, which correspond to the silences between the verses and to the silence


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which exists around the singing. The verses themselves, therefore, punctuate the silences, developing the thought, repeating the tune, identical in shape yet also different, each contributing its part to the whole. A well-organized hymn will have verses that succeed each other to make up a satisfactory whole, without necessarily making that construction too obvious. As James Montgomery wrote: A hymn must have a beginning, middle, and end. There should be a manifest gradation in the thoughts, and their mutual dependence should be so perceptible that they could not be transposed without injuring the unity of the piece; every line carrying forward the connection, and every verse adding a well-proportioned limb to a symmetrical body. The reader should know when the strain is complete, and be satisfied, as at the close of an air in music; while defects and superfluities should be felt by him as annoyances, in whatever part they might occur.63 The most common way of achieving unity is through theological patterning. There are hymns on the Holy Trinity, for example, which have a ‘given’ structure: three verses, one for each of the persons of the Trinity, and one to celebrate the mystery of the one-in-three. Another structure can come from human characteristics: so Bryn Rees begins each verse of his ‘Have faith in God . . . ’ hymn with (1) ‘heart’ (2) ‘mind’ and (3) ‘soul’— Have faith in God, my heart, Trust and be unafraid;— and the fourth verse unites the previous three: Lord Jesus, make me whole; Grant me no resting place, Until I rest, heart, mind, and soul, The captive of thy grace. In the same way the human soul on pilgrimage is the structuring principle of ‘Guide me, O thou great Jehovah’, where the first verse asks for guidance on pilgrimage, the second finds the soul in the desert— Let the fiery, cloudy pillar Lead me all my journey through: and in the third verse the soul is crossing the river Jordan into the Promised Land, where in heaven Songs of praises I will ever give to thee. Some hymns do not travel like this, but come back to where they began: ‘Rock of Ages, cleft for me’ is an example, concluding:

63

James Montgomery, The Christian Psalmist, p. xiv.

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Whilst I draw this fleeting breath, When my eye-strings break in death, When I soar through tracts unknown, See thee on thy judgement throne, Rock of Ages, cleft for me, Let me hide myself in thee. Refrains are also important in establishing a structure, for they provide a fixed point to which the hymn can return. They are finest when they act as a counterpart to the main text of a hymn, as in Charles Wesley's ‘Rejoice, the Lord is King!’, where the refrain runs Lift up your heart, lift up your voice; Rejoice! Again I say, Rejoice! The verses describe Christ in majesty, although the initial reference is to the first and last verses of Psalm 97: ‘The Lord reigneth, let the earth rejoice’ and ‘Rejoice in the Lord, ye righteous: and give thanks at the remembrance of his holiness’. The hymn then changes from an Old Testament psalm to the New Testament celebration of Christ as the Saviour, based upon the Apostles' Creed; but throughout comes the refrain from Philippians 4: 4, and from the Sursum Corda, lift up your hearts, until the final refrain, which deliberately counters the original text with another one: We soon shall hear the archangel's voice; The trump of God shall sound: Rejoice! This is from 1 Corinthians 15: 52–4, which thrillingly takes up the reference to ‘Mortals’ in verse 1 (‘Mortals, give thanks and sing . . . ’): The trumpet shall sound . . . and when this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that was written, Death is swallowed up in victory. As a final example of the way in which a hymn is structured, and the way in which its structure is inextricably bound up with the meaning, I propose to discuss briefly John Ellerton's ‘The day thou gavest, Lord, is ended’:64 The day thou gavest, Lord, is ended, The darkness falls at thy behest; To thee our morning hymns ascended, Thy praise shall sanctify our rest. This verse deals with one day, with morning and evening, and with the believer in church, singing his hymns in the morning and praising God as

64

For a more detailed discussion of this hymn, see J. R. Watson, ‘The day Thou gavest’, Bulletin of the Hymn Society, 158 (Sept. 1983), 144–50.


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he goes to bed. He sings to God who made the day, who made light and darkness, as we are told in Genesis 1: 1–5 he sings as one who is subject to time and space, to morning and evening, to physical tiredness, to getting up and going to bed. Then, as a surprise, comes the second verse: We thank thee that thy church unsleeping, While earth rolls onward into light, Through all the world her watch is keeping, And rests not now by day or night. This verse signals a great change in point of view. The second line, in particular, pictures the earth as rolling onwards into light, so that the singer has a momentary glimpse in his mind of the earth seen from outside, as if from another planet, or from a spaceship. Since the hymn was written by a Victorian clergyman, he could not have been thinking of spaceships, but what Ellerton did see in his mind's eye was the globe, spinning through space, turning as it did so, so that one side became gradually light and the other dark. He saw the globe as we might imagine God seeing it, from outside, and hearing, as Ellerton himself imagined it, the endless sound of praise and prayer from those parts of the world which are temporarily in light. Somewhere in the world, someone is always praising God, and in this way the Church never sleeps. The singer of verse 1 is constrained by his ordinary human limitations, as one who is bound by time and space; the singer of verse 2 transcends these conditions through his vision of the turning world and the unsleeping Church. His is the freedom of the imagination. If we now think of this contrast in terms of the hymn as a whole, we can see that there are five verses, of which these two mark a significant opening contrast between one mode of perception and another. The imaginative perception of verse 2 is continued through verses 3 and 4, and the hymn is then brought back to earth in verse 5. The structure resembles a bridge: there are three spans or arches, and two solid abutments on either side. In this hymn the first and last verses provide solid ground, and the three verses in the middle are like three great leaps of the poetic imagination, leaps of faith and hope. And the progression from beginning to end is conducted with a sure and sensible motion, with a clear and unhurried pace: each verse finishes what it has to say, and yet each leads on to the next, so that there are pauses in the thought and then a new verse starts up, with new energy and purpose. The hymn has been associated with various texts: in Church Hymns with Tunes (1874) it was prefaced with a version of 1 Chronicles 23: 30: ‘Their office was to stand every morning to thank and praise the Lord, and likewise at even.’ In the 1889 edition of Hymns Ancient and Modern it was headed with a quotation from Psalm 113: 3: ‘The Lord's Name is praised

40


from the rising up of the sun unto the going down of the same.’ Yet to think of the hymn as in any way an exposition of these texts is to realize how far the biblical verses are transcended, not by the content of the hymn so much as by its expression of that content. Its soaring central verses, anchored firmly by the first and last, comprehend much more than the praise of God from morning till night: they convey the mind's ability to reach beyond the confinements of space and time, to proclaim a vision that is as comprehensive as the Bible itself, from Genesis to Revelation. It begins with ‘The day thou gavest’, with God as Creator, God who said, in the first great miracle, ‘Let there be light . . . And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night’ (Genesis 1: 3–5); it ends with all creatures owning the rule of God, as they do in Revelation 5: 13: And every creature which is in heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them, heard I saying, Blessing, and honour, and glory, and power, be unto him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb for ever and ever. Ellerton's hymn is vast and comprehensive in its vision, and it has an extraordinary ability to bring together the beginning and the end, day and night, one side of the earth and the other, one end of the Bible and the other; it is a hymn which, through the structure of its verses, allows the reader/singer to acknowledge the limitations of his humanity, of time and place, of beginnings and endings, and yet also allows a vision of a world beyond, in which time and place are no more, and God is Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. It is a hymn about the intersection of the timeless with time as surely as T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets; in a different idiom, but one in which the form as content is perfectly calculated. Its 9.8.9.8. lines, its verse formations, and the structure of those verses in the complete hymn, all work together to produce the text that we have, with its vision of the beginning and ending of a day, and its accompanying vision of the beginning and ending of the world. Its ‘content’ is found, however, not in any summary from 1 Chronicles, or even from Genesis and Revelation, but from the text itself, its metrical shape in which the content becomes something different from a rendering of a biblical patchwork; it becomes a new experience in and through the metre. Here, and in all hymns, we may understand what Coleridge meant when he said that ‘metre itself implies a passion’.65 Clearly not all expressions in metre are successful, and there are many hymns in which the metre becomes an excuse for inadequate or self-indulgent thought and feeling. But in many of the finest hymns, the metre implies the passion: in the oldest sense of ‘implies’, it folds in the passion, enwraps and entangles it; as well as

65

Coleridge to William Sotheby, 13 July 1802: The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs (Oxford, 1956–71).


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being an indication of the passion, the well-wrought hymn generates and expresses it with every reading and with every fresh singing. In these first two chapters I have tried to show how a hymn works, what it may consist of, and what the problems of interpretation and experience may be. Such a synchronic examination has its usefulness, but for a full understanding of an individual hymn it is necessary to see it in a historical context, which affects the hymn because it determines the hermeneutics by which the biblical material is explored, and the composition of the interpretive community for which it is written. The hymn-writing of the Puritans, for example, is different from that of the Anglican hymnody of Cosin and Ken, because the latter are closer to the disciplines of private prayer and Anglican devotional practice, whereas the Puritan hymns are more likely to refer to scriptural teaching and to the development of religious societies, of the ‘gathered church’.66 I have chosen to begin with Sternhold and Hopkins and The Whole Booke of Psalmes. This is an approach which is counter to the received opinion that metrical psalmody is essentially different from hymnody, and that it actually got in the way of the development of the hymn.67 I would argue that it is important to begin with the metrical psalms of the Reformation, for several reasons: they were written for congregational singing, they were written in the vernacular, and they represent a dual response to the problem of the adequacy of religious expression—a reliance on a faithful transposition of a particularly revered part of the Old Testament, and simultaneously an employment of the psalms as expressions of the spiritual conflicts, the hopes and fears, of the believer. In all of these features they resemble the hymns which came after them, and which developed from them: they have much more in common with hymns than is generally supposed, for they are united more than separated by their underlying nature and purpose. I shall suggest, also, that the distinctive rhetoric of hymns owes something to the traditions of word order imposed by the need for metrical psalms to accommodate the original material to the strict metre of sung psalms in the vernacular.

66

The title of Donald Davie's study of Dissent and its literature, A Gathered Church (London, 1978).

67

See, for example, the account of Reformation hymnody in Louis F. Benson, The English Hymn (London, 1915), 20 ff.

3 Laud Unto the Lord: The Whole Booke of Psalmes There is nothing that hath drawne multitudes to be of their Sects so much, as the singing of their psalmes (Roman Catholic writer, 1616) The Reformation began, in one sense, with a psalm. Its origins may have been elsewhere, in dissent, dissatisfaction with the current state of things, and political opportunism, but its courage came from Luther, and especially from his inspired rendering of Psalm 46, ‘Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott’. Heine called it ‘the Marseillaise Hymn of the Reformation’;68 it seems likely that it was composed at the time of the Diet of Speyer in 1529, when the German princes took the title of Protestants for the first time. It was certainly used to great effect in the following year at the Diet of Augsburg. Its first line, with its powerful ‘feste Burg’, reminds the singers that they are part of a community, that it is ‘unser Gott’, our God, who is this strong tower. This is a note that will appear everywhere during the next century and a half—God is not their God, but our God: ‘We are his flocke, he doth us feed’; ‘God is the refuge of his saints’. During the reign of Mary Tudor, the saints were to be found in Frankfurt and Geneva, using psalms which had originated, perhaps surprisingly, in the royal courts of France and England. In France, Clement Marot produced versions of the psalms for the court of Francis I during the 1530s, and in England Thomas Sternhold, Groom of the King's Wardrobe, similarly produced ‘holye songes’ for the court, publishing an edition of nineteen metrical versions in or around the year of his death, 1549. He must have written others before he died, because in 1549 John Hopkins printed a

68

Quoted in John Julian, A Dictionary of Hymnology (London, 1892), 323. The summary of the development of Reformation psalmody is brief in this chapter, partly because the subject has been extensively treated elsewhere, especially well by Robin A. Leaver, in ‘Goostly Psalmes and Spirituall Songes’: English and Dutch Metrical Psalms (Oxford, 1991); earlier studies include R. E. Prothero, The Psalms in Human Life (London, 1903), and Millar Patrick, Four Centuries of Scottish Psalmody (London, 1949).

THE WHOLE BOOKE OF PSALMES

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further collection of ‘Al such Psalmes of David as Thomas Sternehold late grome of the Kinges Majesties Robes, didde in his life time draw into English Metre’, containing thirty-seven versions by Sternhold and seven by himself. The two collections came into church use as the basis of an English psalter for the Protestant exiles from 1553 to 1558. The congregation at Geneva was encouraged in the use of metrical psalmody by Calvin, who had used such psalms when in exile at Strasbourg and who had published in 1539 Aucun Pseaumes et Cantiques mys en Chant, subsequently arguing that no better songs could be found than these psalms of David, which had been inspired by the Holy Spirit.69 This was his recommendation to the Genevan edition of fifty psalms by Marot, published in 1543; some of them were translated into English, joined with the work of Sternhold and Hopkins, and incorporated into the Anglo-Genevan Psalter of 1556, containing ‘One and Fiftie Psalmes of David in Englishe metre, whereof 37 were made by Thomas Sterneholde: and the rest by others’.70 This collection was expanded in 1558, mainly by William Whittingham, subsequently Dean of Durham, and others, including John Pullain, who gave to English hymnody the fine springy metre of 6 6 6 6. 4 4 4 4 for Psalm 148, ‘Give laud unto the Lord’ (a metre subsequently used to great effect by Wither, Baxter, and Watts). On the return of the Protestant exiles at the accession of Elizabeth I, further editions appeared in 1560 and 1561, claiming to be ‘Newly set fourth and allowed, accordyng to the order appointed in the Quenes Maiesties Iniunctions’. This was expanded in 1562, adding psalms by Hopkins, Thomas Norton, William Kethe, and John Marckant, to make The Whole Booke of Psalmes, collected into Englysh metre by T. Starnhold, I. Hopkins & others. Different translations and tunes, found in an Anglo-Genevan Psalter of 1561, Four Score and Seven Psalmes of David in English Mitre, took a different course and are found in the 1564 Scottish Psalter, printed in Edinburgh, which began a separate tradition of Scottish metrical psalmody. The metrical psalm books also entertained the possibility of hymns on other subjects, by printing a small range of supplementary material, also versified for singing. These included the Veni Creator, the Te Deum, the Benedicite, the Benedictus, the Magnificat, the Nunc Dimittis, the Quicunque Vult, Lamentations, and the Lord's Prayer; and in the inclusion of these texts can be seen the beginnings of a tradition of hymns, of a certain kind, with the biblical text versified. The metrical psalms, too, were themselves included for reasons which can be seen, with hindsight, to be relevant

69

Horton Davies, Worship and Theology in England from Cranmer to Hooker, 1534–1603 (Princeton, 1970), 385.

70

See Maurice Frost, English and Scottish Psalm and Hymn Tunes, c. 1543–1677 (London, 1953), 3.

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to the early development of Protestant hymnody. They were, for example, expressions of individual belief: Anthony Gilby, one of the translators who worked on the Geneva Bible, saw them as personal testimony and record of religious experience—‘whereas al other scriptures do teach us what God saith unto us, these praiers . . . do teach us, what we shall saie unto God’.71 They had a special significance for Calvin, who turned his attention to them as soon as he had finished his commentaries on the New Testament. His preface described the psalms as ‘The Anatomy of all parts of the soul’: for not an affection will a man find in himself, an image of which is not reflected in this glass. Nay, all the griefs, sorrows, fears, misgivings, hopes, cares, anxieties, in short, all the troublesome emotions with which the minds of men are wont to be agitated, the Holy Spirit has here pictured to the life.72 In addition to their presentation of individual experience, the psalms were also congregational. They were to be sung by the people gathered together, and their subject was often ‘we’: Thou Lord hast been our sure defence, our place of ease and rest,— (Psalm 90) equally the subject is also ‘I’, but in collective singing the ‘I’ becomes an expression of a personal experience which is shared: With heart I doe accord To praise and laud the Lord:— (Psalm 111) Their character is thus expressive and congregational. In addition it is didactic, often expounding the psalms as having a greater significance than might at first appear, by presenting Christ in prefigurations and riddles. Thus, in The Whole Booke of Psalmes, Psalm 2 is headed: David rejoyceth that albeit enemies and worldly power rage, God wil advance his kingdome, even to the farthest end of the world. Therefore he exhorteth Princes humbly to submit themselves under the same. Herein is signified Christ and his kingdome. And William Tyndale, in pre-Reformation times, had noted that ‘there was Christ but figured and described in ceremonies, in riddles, and parables, and in dark prophecies’.73 At the Reformation itself, the psalms were seen to be of particular importance, not only as individual expressions of religious experience, or as divinely inspired, or as prefigurations of the New Testament,

71

Quoted in Rivkah Zim, English Metrical Psalms, Poetry as Praise and Prayer, 1535–1601 (Cambridge, 1987), 28.

72

John Calvin, A Commentary on the Psalms, trans. Arthur Golding, rev. T. H. L. Parker (London, 1965), 16.

73

William Tyndale, ‘Obedience of a Christian Man’, quoted in Israel Baroway, ‘The Bible as Poetry in the English Renaissance: An Introduction’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 32 (1933), 447–80.


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but as clear indicators of the great divide that existed between the children of God and their enemies. The interpretation of the Genevan church as the true successor of the children of Israel is one that is invited by the ‘Argument’ prefaced to the psalms in the Geneva Bible: ‘ . . . The wicked and the persecutors of the children of God shall see howe the hand of God is ever against them . . . ’. It was for these reasons that Calvin welcomed them as an aid to worship, in forms that made them easily memorable and singable through the provision of tunes and metres. In addition to the widespread sense that the psalms were an aid to individual devotion and to congregational worship, there was also the awareness that the psalms were great poetry, written by one who was, in Donne's phrase, ‘a better Poet than Virgil’.74 Donne's assertion may seem astonishing, but it was characteristic of its time, which tended to see parts of the Bible as ‘the only patern of true Poesie’.75 The psalms, above all, were seen as the finest compendium of lyric poetry;76 and various theories were produced to try to prove that they had originally been written in metre. Barnaby Googe, in his preface to Eclogues, Epytaphes, and Sonetes (1563), thought that they were in ‘perfect and pleasaunt hexameter verses’, and that they were ‘garnished and set forth with sweete according tunes and heavenly soundes of pleasaunt metre’.77 George Wither, in the early seventeenth century, was less certain about the exact form, but equally clear that the psalms had been written in some kind of metre.78 Googe and Wither were contributors to a long-running discussion about the nature of the psalm form; but whatever the particular theory, each writer would have agreed that in some way the psalms were poetry, and poetry of a particular excellence and holy character. To turn them into English metre, therefore, was to get closer to the original than a prose translation might have done; and in the sixteenth century there were numerous versions, including one by Sir Thomas Wyatt of the Seven Penitential Psalms, and the rendering by Sir Philip Sidney, completed after his death by his sister, the Countess of Pembroke (her version of Psalm 139 is in Songs of Praise).79 In all these translations, and in all the employment of metrical psalms in worship, the great theoretical justification was found in the Bible as both source-book and supreme authority.80 The Bible's authority was

74

The Sermons of John Donne, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1953–62), iv. 167.

75

Edward Leigh, Annotations on Five Poetical Books of the Old Testament (1657), quoted in Barbara Keifer Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton, 1979), 7.

76

Ibid. 39.

77

Ibid. 39.

78

Quoted in Baroway, ‘The Bible as Poetry in the English Renaissance’, 473.

79

George Wither, A Preparation to the Psalter (London, 1619), 58 ff.

80

For Wyatt and Sidney's metrical psalms, see Zim, English Metrical Psalms, chs. 2 and 5.

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contrasted with the accumulated traditions of Rome, which in the eyes of the Reformers had become impure through centuries of human fallibility; and it was the fear of a further human fallibility, too, which led Calvin and his followers to reject another alternative, the freer movement of Lutheran hymnody. By sticking to metrical psalms, the Calvinists not only satisfied their need for a poetry of individual spiritual experience, but also found that experience stabilized on the rock of Holy Scripture. The metrical psalms thus established themselves, in a very short time, as important features of Protestant worship, part of a Church which, as Patrick Collinson has shown, was Calvinist in tone and temper.81 They had a special place in the Reformed liturgy because they were, in Horton Davies's phrase, ‘God's own Word at one slight remove’,82 and the Reformers were deeply and humbly conscious of their great privilege and good fortune in having access to the Word of God. As the Preface to the Geneva Bible expressed it (characteristically laying claim to the sentiments of I Peter 2: 9): we are especially bounde (deare brethren) to give him thankes without ceasing for his great grace and unspeakable mercies, in that it has pleased him to call us unto this marveilous light of his Gospel— The result was a religion that was both biblical and individually inspiring, and there is evidence that metrical psalmody played a considerable part in its continued appeal.83 In translating ‘Holy Davids divine Poeme’,84 therefore, Sternhold and Hopkins and the others were undertaking a great and necessary work. They

81

See Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants (Oxford, 1982), 82 ff.

82

Davies, Worship . . . from Cranmer to Hooker, 14.

83

A Roman Catholic writer in 1616 complained that: ‘There is nothing that hath drawne multitudes to be of their Sects so much, as the singing of their psalmes, in such variable and delightful tunes: These the souldier singeth in warre, the artizans at their worke, wenches spinning and sewing, apprentises in their shoppes, and wayfaring men in their travaile, little knowing (God wotte) what a serpent lyeth hidden under these sweete flowers.’ (Tesseradelphus, or the Foure Brothers (1616) quoted in Helen C. White, The Tudor Books of Private Devotions (Wisconsin, 1951), 44). This evidence helps to explain why The Whole Booke of Psalmes continued to survive, and played such a large part in the religious experience, especially of the Puritans, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It did so in spite of its many detractors, who included George Wither (who was attempting to justify his own Hymnes and Songs of the Church by attacking the work of his predecessors) and Milton's nephew Edward Phillips, who described the singing of metrical psalms as: ‘Like a crack'd saints' bell jarring in the steeple | Tom Sternhold's wretched prick-song for the people.’ A ‘prick-song’ was a song ‘pricked’ or written out, so that it could be sung by everyone, usually ‘lined out’, with the clerk singing the line and the congregation repeating it. In that way the metrical psalms became well enough known to be sung by heart: in the parish church the clerk may have lined them out, but Cromwell's soldiers could sing them on the battlefields. In the metrical psalms, as Horton Davies has pointed out, the Puritans found a supernatural sanction for their conduct and comfort in perplexity and danger; and when they were learnt by heart, they entered the blood-stream of the language, as the Geneva Bible did.

84

Zim, English Metrical Psalms, 43.


47

saw it as an essential adjunct to worship (there is some doubt about whether the singing of metrical psalms was ever authorized by the Elizabethan settlement, but the Puritans pushed for their use wherever possible) and as an aid to private meditation. It was, in the words of some of the title pages: Set forth and allowed to be Sung in all Churches, of all the people together, and after Morning and evening Prayer, as also before and after Sermons: and moreover in private Houses for their godly solace and comfort, laying apart all ungodly Songs and Ballads, which tend onely to the nourishing of vice, and corrupting of Youth. To the Puritans, as to Calvin, the metrical psalms were to be thought of as a natural way for the Christian of expressing joy. The quotation on all title pages of The Whole Booke of Psalmes is from James 5: ‘If any be afflicted let him Pray, if any be merry, let him sing Psalmes.’ Because the psalms were so precious, it was important not to lose any of them: that was the force behind the desire of the Genevan exiles to complete the work done by Sternhold. The material was often intractable: Sidney described the poet as one who ‘commeth to you with words set in delightful proportion, either accompanied with, or prepared for, the well-inchaunting skill of Musicke’,85 but in this case the words were to some degree already chosen for the poet. In that was their glory, for they were the divinely inspired words of David; in that was also their challenge. The metrical psalms were an exercise in the inclusion of words, and those words were special: the result was an uneven accommodation between the demands of the verse form, the words of the original Hebrew, and the poet's desire to provide ‘words set in delightful proportion’. The fact that this accommodation worked well for so long is a testimony to the presence of something in the metrical psalms that is more interesting than the ‘doggerel’ that it is sometimes dismissed as being. It is important, in the first place, not to read them with an ear which is unattuned to their particular rhythms and resonances. The word ‘doggerel’, applied to the ‘Old Version’, was John Wesley's (‘wretched, scandalous doggerel’86), and Wesley was one of a number of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century detractors (notably Thomas Warton in his History of English Poetry), who looked back at the work of Sternhold and Hopkins with the eyes and ears of those who had been brought up on the elegance of Augustan rhetoric. In particular, later writers would have had classical views about the use of stress in poetry, whereas there is evidence that to the Elizabethans this was much less important. As the modern editors of George Puttenham's The

85

Quoted in Catherine Ing, Elizabethan Lyrics (London, 1951), 31.

86

The Letters of John Wesley, A.M., ed. John Telford (London, 1931), iii. 227.

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Arte of English Poesie, first published in 1589, have asserted, ‘We only half-read Gascoigne or Golding or Spenser if we fail to allow for the Elizabethan mind and ear.’87 They point out that it is ‘irrelevant to apply to early-Tudor versemaking the stress principle as a clearly analysed concept’.88 So it seems probable that a word such as ‘unto’ (as in ‘Approach with joy his courts unto’) would have been metrically more pleasing than it now is because of the lack of accent on the ‘to’. Puttenham's practice suggests that to the metrical psalmists two things were of considerable importance—number and rhyme. Rhyme was the ‘Poetes cheife Musicke’;89 in the singing of metrical psalms its importance would have been increased still further by the practice of beginning and ending most lines with a long note, thus throwing a double length on to the final syllable. The Puritans, in particular, were very concerned to ensure that the music was not too elaborate, and that it fitted the notes to the syllables. Bishop Horne's instructions for Winchester in 1571 have often been quoted: that in the quire no note shall be used in song that shall drown any word or syllable, or draw out in length or shorten any word or syllable otherwise than by the nature of the word [as] it is pronounced in common speech, whereby the sentence cannot well be perceived by the hearers.90 It may have been for such clarity of singing that Sternhold himself habitually used the Double Common Metre form, with the words lightly stressed; it is a form which comes from the old ‘fourteener’, which was broken up into eight and six, possibly for typographical reasons, but more probably because the shorter lines were easier units to sing and hold in the mind. Rhyme, however, remained centrally important, ‘the rudder of verses’.91 This is from Psalm I: And as the tree that planted is fast by the ryver syde: Even so shall he bring forth his frute in his due tyme and tyde. His leafe shall never fall a waye but floryshe styll and stande, Eche thyng shal prosper wonderous well that he doeth take in hand—

87

George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge, 1936), introduction, p. lxiv.

88

Ibid., introduction, pp. lxvii–lxviii: ‘Nobody could be clearer on this subject than Puttenham . . . contrasting the theoretically undifferentiated English linne (having ‘no such feete or times or stirres’) with the internal ripple of the classical line. . . ’.

89

Ibid. 75.

90

Quoted, for example, in Stanford E. Lehmberg, The Reformation of Cathedrals: Cathedrals in English Society, 1485–1603 (Princeton, 1988), 154.

91

Puttenham, p. lxvii. The delight of the ear is the ‘cadence or the tuneable accent in the ende of the verse’.


49

Although the stresses are light, the lines proceed with the certainty of a clock, beating out their fourteen syllables with a distinctive regularity. To achieve this, certain stylistic effects have to be employed: the word-order is changed (‘the tree that planted is’), phrases are inserted, making a suspension (‘gon/by wicked rede astray’), articles are omitted (‘sate in chayre of pestilence’), and proverbial phrases are used to fill up a line (‘his due tyme and tyde’, where both the Geneva Bible and Coverdale have ‘in due season’). The result is an extraordinary and peculiar rhetoric, a combination of metrical regularity and syntactical distortion: in order to get the Hebrew original into ‘fourteeners’ (or eight and six), Sternhold has to use considerable ingenuity, and force the material into place: as we shall see, he does so in the knowledge of certain well-known and widely accepted figures of rhetoric. The marked deviations from normal speech are partly responsible for the memorable qualities of the verses: the material is twisted about to suit the metre, and in that twisting the material itself is changed through language, so that it becomes unfamiliar, and yet rhythmical in the regular line. Often the arrangement of the lines encourages the perception of parallelism: O Lord within thy Tabernacle who shall inhabite still, Or whom wilt thou receive to dwell in thy most holy hill? (Psalm 15) The perception of the parallelism, in which one ‘fourteener’ repeats or supplements the other may have been encouraged by the typographical arrangement of the Geneva Bible, which was the first to divide the text into numbered verses, thereby making the original parallelisms more obvious.92 At the same time, however, the musical arrangement tended to divide the verses into four or eight, with the long notes occurring at the end of each line (so that a long note could, if necessary, accommodate an extra syllable, as in ‘Tabernacle’). Sternhold therefore shaped his material into a rigorous, demanding, but flexible pattern, using proverbial phrases such as ‘tyme and tyde’ and doublings such as ‘just and straight’ to see him through metrically. He was a skilful versifier, and it has been argued by Richard Baird Weir that his original versions were much finer than the texts of the 1562 book, in which his work was altered by Whittingham.93 Hopkins radically altered the verse-form from the old ‘fourteener’ by rhyming ABAB on some occasions, thus making the rhyme words even more important:

92

Gerald Hammond, The Making of the English Bible (Manchester, 1982), 113. See also Hallett Smith, ‘English Metrical Psalms in the Sixteenth Century and their Literary Significance’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 9 (1945–6), 249–71.

93

See Richard Baird Weir, ‘Thomas Sternhold and the Beginnings of English Metrical Psalmody’, unpubl. Ph.D. thesis (New York University, 1974).

50


I waited long and sought the Lord, and patiently did beare, At length to me he did accord my voice and cry to heare. The Double Common Metre stanza is by far the commonest form in The Whole Booke of Psalmes, perhaps because of Sternhold's initial attempts, found in his work on the first twenty-two psalms. But as the volume grew in Geneva, the translators began to experiment with other metres. Thus Thomas Norton's Psalm 111 is in the metre used by Clement Marot for Psalms 3 and 6, a stanza rhyming AABCCB in six-syllable lines: With heart I doe accord To praise and laud the Lord: In presence of the just. For great his workes are found, To search them such are bound, As doe him love and trust. The French poets used a ten-syllable line in many places, such as Marot's Psalm 50: in the English versions, such lines are frequently divided, making a regular caesura. As with the division of the ‘fourteener’ into eight and six for ease of singing, this may have been dictated by a desire for clarity, and for individual attention to the shorter units of sense; but it is also notable that the Elizabethan rhetoricians paid considerable attention to the provision of a regular pause in the line, which they called ‘Cesure’. ‘If there be no Cesure at all, and the verse [i.e. line] long’, wrote Puttenham, ‘the lesse is the makers skill and hearers delight.’94 Puttenham argued that caesuras should be regularly observed, and that in a line of ten syllables the pause should come after the fourth, as it does in Hopkins's version of Clement Marot's ten-syllable metre in Psalm 50: The mighty God, th'eternall hath thus spoke, And all the world he will call and provoke, Even from the East, and so forth to the West; From towards Sion, which place he liketh best, God will appear in beauty most excellent; Our God will come before long time be spent.

94

Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, 75.


51

Puttenham would have approved of this arrangement: ‘in every long verse the Cesure ought to be kept precisely’, if it were but to serve as a law to correct the licentiousnesse of rymers, besides that it pleaseth the eare better, & sheweth more cunning in the maker by following the rules of his restraint.95 The printing of short lines brings the metrical psalm in English close to the Geneva Bible: If the Lorde had not bene on our side, (May Israel nowe say) If the Lorde had not bene on our side, When men rose up against us, They had them swallowed us up quick, When their wrath was kindled against us— There is a similar correspondence between the Geneva Bible and the metrical version in formal terms in William Kethe's version of Psalm 134. The original is very short (three verses), beginning ‘Beholde, praise yee the Lord, all yee servants of the Lord, ye that by night stand in the house of the Lord’; Kethe aptly chooses Short Metre (as opposed to the French version's Long Metre) for this: Behold and have regard, ye Servants of the Lord, Which in his house by night doe watch, praise him with one accord. These versions suggest that the metrical psalmists were conscious both of biblical precedents and of such technical matters as the most suitable metre and the most appropriate style: while retaining the fidelity to the original text as their primary objective, they will use appropriate rhetorical devices where necessary. Perhaps the most spectacular example is found in John Pullain's version of Psalm 148, beginning with the rhetorical figure of Paronomasia, or playing with words: Give laud unto the Lord, from heav'n that is so hie: Praise him in deed and word, above the starrie Sky. And also ye his Angels all, armies royall, praise him with glee. Pullain's version takes much of its effect from clever patterns of repetition and expansion, beginning with this first verse which also uses the

95

Ibid. 75–6.

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figure of Epanodis or Retire, which is ‘the resumption of a former proposition uttered in generalitie to explane the same better by a particular division’.96 This figure alters ‘Give laud’ from line 1 to ‘Praise him in deed and word’ in line 3; it is found elsewhere in ‘Angels all/armies royall’ and in ‘Ye heavens faire/and clouds of the ayre’ in verse 2. The metrical psalmists may be understood better, therefore, if we appreciate their relationship to the teaching of rhetoric, as well as their fidelity to the original text, especially as mediated through the Geneva Bible. But there are other qualities to be considered, in particular their use of vigorous and homely diction. Thomas Norton's Psalm 106 describes the children of Israel in the wilderness: Then when they lodged in their tents at Moses they did grutch:— where Coverdale has ‘angered’ and the Geneva Bible ‘envied’. In a more extensive form, John Hopkins is extremely skilful at conveying the discomfort of a person who has vowed to keep silence but who can control himself no longer: I held my tongue and spake no word, but kept me close and still, Yea, from good talke I did refraine, but sore against my will. My heart waxt hot within my breast, with musing, thought, and doubt, Which did increase and stir the fire, at last these words burst out:— (Psalm 39) This is the predicament of a person who has vowed to keep his tongue as with a bridle while the wicked is before him: the phrase in Coverdale is ‘at the last I spake with my tongue’, and in the Geneva Bible ‘I spake with my tongue’, neither of which conveys the pent-up feelings as well as Hopkins's version. This homely and forceful language is part of the dramatic nature of the psalms, in which the singing becomes expressive of human emotions: the metrical psalms turn into religious folk ballads, giving expression (as the reformers had hoped) to the feelings and aspirations of ordinary people. The metrical psalms speak directly and powerfully, as the ballads had done: and the syntax becomes part of the effect, the spoken voice shaping the verse, and the verse form shaping the speech.97

96

Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, 221.

97

This effect has been acutely observed and well described by O. B. Hardison, Jr.: ‘Syntax . . . has a determining effect on the way a given text is enacted by the speaking voice and creates what speech act theory calls the illocutionary aspect of the text’ (Prosody and Purpose in the English Renaissance (Baltimore and London, 1989), 3).


53

Throughout the psalms there are references to the sharp division between good and evil: the psalm singer knew that he was surrounded by ‘wicked men’, but that ‘assuredly/The Lord will me sustaine’. He knew that the good must be encouraged, and that others agreed with his ideas of what that good was: The heav'ns do shew with joy and mirth, thy wondrous workes, O Lord: Thy Saints within thy Church on earth, thy faith and truth record (Psalm 89: 5) It is possible to see the creation of a vivid myth of the saints and their opponents: the story of the children of Israel and their escape from captivity in Egypt was an obvious prefiguring of the Reformation itself and later of the Puritans in opposition to Laud, and Cromwell's soldiers carried the Geneva Bible in their packs and the metrical psalms in their hearts. Together with the Geneva Bible, the metrical psalms thus helped to establish a temper of mind that was to have a profound significance for political events in the seventeenth century. It is possible, too, that they had much more of an effect on the writing of hymns than has hitherto been suggested. In many ways they look forward to hymns: sometimes their actual phrases are preserved intact—‘From age to age’, ‘Ye servants of the Lord’, ‘His mercy faileth never’—but more often it is a question of the general accommodation of the sense to the verse form. Metrical psalms, as we have seen, rely heavily on rhyme and on syllabic counting, and see it as their purpose to accommodate the original sense of the psalm into a simple and singable verse form. To this end they are prepared to engage in many stylistic deviations from the norm, most notably the changes in word order which we think of as inversion and suspension, and which a rhetorician such as Puttenham would have described as Hiperbaton and Parenthesis.98 It would be impossible to establish this, because we can never know what the alternatives would have been in any text, but it is quite possible that the modes of hymn-writing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries would have been different if the ears of the faithful had not been accustomed to the twists and turns of metrical psalmody. But there is more than versification and rhetoric to justify the suggestion that the metrical psalm, rather than keeping out the English hymn, actually was a part of its development. In the first place, it began the tradition of congregational singing; secondly, it versified the Bible, and was didactic; and thirdly, it expressed spiritual problems, hopes, fears, and individual emotions. In the creation of the metrical psalms, we are witnessing not only the birth of a new and recognizable rhetoric, but also the beginnings of the art form that we later recognize as hymnody.

98

Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, 168–9.

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An example is found in the version of Psalm 100 by William Kethe, which is also deeply Protestant in tone and feeling. It depends for its effect on the appeal to the distinctive concept of the people of God, in an interactive relationship with ‘All people that on earth doe dwell’. The word ‘people’ (advanced from Coverdale's verse 2, and taking the place of his ‘lands’) is of crucial importance: it is an all-embracing word, often used in liturgy to mean the congregation as opposed to the priest. Here it signals the end of a priestly, hierarchical religion, and the beginning of a people's religion, a religion of the community, of the city (as in Calvin's Geneva), and of the whole world: All people that on earth doe dwell, sing to the Lord with chearfull voyce, Him serve with feare, his praise forth tell, come ye before him and rejoyce. The Lord ye know is God indeed, without our aide he did us make, We are his flocke, he doth us feed, and for his sheep he doth us take. The nobility of this metrical psalm comes from its powerful organization of rhetorical figures of amplification within the Long Metre stanza, growing through a crescendo to the resounding affirmation of verse 4. Together with its original tune, it has remained a living part of the Protestant tradition and is still to be found in most hymn-books. Another of the original versions from The Whole Booke of Psalmes which has survived into the present century is Sternhold's version of Psalm 18, beginning ‘O God my strength and fortitude’. Its most rightly celebrated verse is that which translates verses 9 and 10 of the psalm. The Geneva Bible rendering is as follows: Hee bowed the heavens also and came downe, and darkenes was under his feete. And he rode upon a Cherub and did flie, and hee came flying upon the wings of the winde. Sternhold's response to this is to add some transforming features, such as ‘he cast’ and ‘full royally’, to make lines which are (in Horton Davies's words) ‘worthy of being illustrated by William Blake’:99 The Lord descended from above, and bow'd the heavens high, and underneath his feet he cast the darknesse of the skie. On Cherubs and on Cherubins full royally he rode, and on the wings of all the winds came flying all abroad.

99

Davies, Worship . . . from Cranmer to Hooker, 388. These were favourite lines of Tennyson: see Hallam Tennyson, Tennyson: A Memoir (one-vol. edn. London, 1899), 754, n. 1.


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God bent the heavens down, and came in darkness, as clouds come close to the earth (it is a good example of Burke's theory that the sublime is closely linked to obscurity); this is found in the Geneva version, but Sternhold gives the verse dignity by using (as he does rarely) two three-syllable words in parallel, ‘descended/underneath’. ‘Underneath’ is a stroke of genius, linking the two parts of the quatrain: it gives the mind time to recover from the sublimity of the first two lines, and in every way is more rhythmically dignified than ‘under’; while ‘he cast’, placed for emphasis at the end of the line, suggests God throwing down the sky before him. It is a second, parallel image of the sublime. The second quatrain which follows relies for its effect on another kind of sublimity, obtained through multiplication. God rides like a king, ‘full royally’, not on a cherub but on a multitude of cherubs and ‘cherubins’; he flies not on the wings of the wind, but ‘on the wings of all the winds’. Sternhold is deliberately letting himself go here, using the figure of Hyperbole, ‘when we speake in the superlative . . . when either we would greatly advaunce or greatly abase the reputation of any thing or person’. His God rides on all the winds, comes from all directions, is everywhere, ‘all abroad’, found in the air, the sky, the darkness and the light, at all points of the compass. To the multiplying plurals Sternhold brilliantly adds his own sound effects; ‘full . . . all . . . all’, ‘royally . . . rode’, ‘wings . . . winds’, ‘Cherub . . . Cherubins’. The biblical text and Sternhold's art of rhetoric combine to produce an effect that is breath-taking in its majestic expression and its sublime content. By the side of such an encounter with language, Thomas Warton's eighteenth-century criticism of The Whole Booke of Psalmes, that it was ‘a translation entirely destitute of elegance, spirit and propriety’,100 seems misguided and patronizing. It is part of an essay in which Warton's antipathy to the zeal of the reformers clouds his judgement, and leads him to describe The Whole Booke of Psalmes as ‘This infectious frenzy of sacred song’.101 But when it is seen in its historical context, and when its effect upon generations of singers is taken into account, The Whole Booke of Psalmes can be seen as a remarkable testimony to the dramatic, committed, and individualistic vision of the Reformers, and to their ability to shape the songs of David into memorable and singable verse. Calvinism, with which the metrical psalm form is inevitably associated, was (in Patrick Collinson's words) ‘the theological cement’ of the English Church.102 During the early seventeenth century that cement was subjected to many pressures from many different beliefs and enthusiasms; and it is

100

Thomas Warton, History of English Poetry (London, 1774–81), iii. 173. Warton's essay is interesting as an example of eighteenth-century distrust of enthusiasm.

101

Ibid. 166.

102

Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants (Oxford, 1982), 82.

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perhaps not surprising that in an age in which the conflicts of religion led to the Civil War, the metrical psalm itself should have developed and been added to. There were many different versions, such as Ainsworth's of 1612, which the Pilgrim Fathers took with them to America; and those versions often emphasize the relevance of the psalms to contemporary life and to religious and political experience. Additionally, the canticles printed with the psalm book provided a precedent for poets such as George Wither to produce paraphrases from the Old and New Testaments, and then to produce poems about religious experience. The homely realism of The Whole Booke of Psalmes, with the children of Israel grutching at Moses and the soul feeling like a pelican in the wilderness, pointed towards a literary form that was to express the twists and turns of the believing mind, as well as the continuing exploration of the great code of the Bible.

4 Keeping Company With David's Psalms: George Wither and Others A Chaplain of this Lower-Quire George Wither George Wither is of particular interest because of his various attempts to supplant Sternhold and Hopkins, by writing his own version, but—more significantly—by beginning to produce other material. His Psalmes of David, ‘Translated into Lyrick-Verse, according to the scope of the Original’, appeared in 1632. Part of his text of the 148th Psalm, ‘The Lord of heaven confess’, is still in use. But he is better known as the author of Hymnes and Songs of the Church (1623), which first challenged the domination of psalmody. Wither had petitioned James I for permission to publish Hymnes and Songs of the Church, which therefore appeared with the words ‘Cum Privilegio Regis Regali’ (‘with the king's royal permission’) on the title-page. This was an attempt to circumvent the monopoly of the Stationers' Company, which had the exclusive right to permit book publishing: the Company promptly succeeded in having the book suppressed, on the grounds that Wither's hymns were unfit ‘to keep company with David's Psalms’.103 This argument was cleverly designed to distance Wither from his royal patron (James I liked to think of himself as a king-writer, as David had been), but it was also part of a wide-ranging debate about what was permissible in religious language and worship. The Stationers' Company, in pursuit of its own ends, cynically allied itself with the traditionalist Puritans, whose use of the psalms alone had the authority of ‘that famous and godly learned man John Calvin’.104

103

‘Introduction’, Hymns and Songs of the Church, ed. Edward Farr (London, 1895), p. xxiv. Farr's edition has an explanatory introduction, but his text is unreliable, and I have therefore quoted from the first editions.

104

From the title-page of the Geneva Service Book. See Maurice Frost, English and Scottish Psalm and Hymn Tunes, c. 1543–1677 (London, 1953), 3.

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GEORGE WITHER AND OTHERS

Wither showed himself to be conscious of this argument in The Schollers Purgatory, a defence of his book published in 1624. He made it clear that what he was doing in Hymnes and Songs of the Church was extending the methods and principles of metrical psalmody to other parts of the Bible, especially those which (like the psalms of David) were lyrical in origin and impulse. These included the Songs of Moses (Exodus 15, Deuteronomy 32), the Song of Deborah and Barak (Judges 5), the Song of Hannah (1 Samuel 2), and other Old Testament celebrations, including Ten Canticles of The Song of Songs, and five Lamentations of Jeremiah. These were followed by five hymns from the New Testament, and certain additional hymns, including a translation of the Veni Creator. This first part was collected under the heading of ‘Hymnes’, and was followed by Part II, ‘Spiritual Songs, appropriated to the severall Times and Occasions, most observable in the Church of England’: these were songs for the festivals of the Church, followed by those for major saints' days, and for ‘other Solemnities, and to praise God for public benefits’. Throughout the volume, but especially in the first part, Wither was struggling with the requirements of the Protestant rhetorical tradition, and with the demands of Reformation theology. This required a fidelity to the original texts, and that fidelity was seen as giving authenticity to any new version: in Wither's case, his boldness in choosing new texts placed an additional strain on his technique (although a version of the Song of Moses had been published in Scotland in 1615, which Wither may have known105). So there are verses which faithfully reproduce the original, often with the necessary inversions and suspensions which were an accepted part of metrical psalmody and its rhetoric: Now shall the prayses of the Lord be sung; For, hee a most renowned Triumph wonne: Both Horse and Man into the Sea he flung: And them together there hath overthrowne. The Lord is He, whose strength doth make me strong; And he is my Salvation, and my Song; My God, for whom I will a House prepare; My Fathers God, whose prayse I will declare. This verse is a dignified pentameter, though with an unexpected transition from a quatrain, rhyming ABAB, to two couplets. Apart from one couplet, its syntax is distorted; it throws an unnatural emphasis on to the verbs by placing them at the end of the line, and making them rhyme words. This would have been even more marked when the words were sung, for the tune (like those of the metrical psalmists) began and ended each line with a long note.

105

Millar Patrick, Four Centuries of Scottish Psalmody (London, 1949), 52.


59

When read, Wither's texts seem heavy: when sung, they are a good example of the way in which hymns employ a ‘singing-saying’ discourse, which in this case produces a much better result, if only because the tunes for Wither's book were written by Orlando Gibbons. ‘The First Song of Moses’, quoted above, was to be sung to SONG 1, a tune which survives in present-day hymn-books; and Gibbons's tunes are the principal reason why Wither's 1623 book is still remembered. Because of the particular reverence attached to the sacred text of the Bible, Wither had to follow it closely, even to the extent of using the same figures of speech, as in the description of Pharaoh's army: The Deepes, a covering over them were throwne, And, to the bottome, sunke they like a stone— And they, the mighty waters sunke into, Ev'n as a weighty piece of Lead will do. In spite of this, Wither is creating a new text. The metre and rhyme shape the words, give prominence to the verbs, and twist the subjects and objects of the sentences around; and when figures of speech are involved, the versification defamiliarizes them, causes the reader to notice the way in which they are included in the particular patterns of rhyme and metre. In creating a new text, Wither has started something which he cannot control, by providing a combination of sound and sense, of image, music and text, which can exist independent of the author's intention. This may be seen in his lovely paraphrase of The Song of Songs: Come, kisse me with those lips of thine; For, better are thy Loves than wine. And, as the powred Oyntments be, Such is the savour of thy Name: And, for the sweetnesse of the same, The Virgins are in love with thee. This is, of course, capable of being taken spiritually, as concerned with the love between Christ and his Church; but it is also, in its vividness, drawing attention to the act of kissing, and it can remind the reader of Elizabethan love poetry. The Song of Songs was regarded as a particularly holy series of canticles in Renaissance hermeneutics, the ultimate work of Solomon following the less exalted Proverbs and Ecclesiastes:106 but it is also a discourse of love,107 and all Wither's versification can do is to confirm this by loosening it from its biblical context. He then attempts to control what he

106

See Barbara Keifer Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton, 1979), 53–69.

107

Francis Landy, ‘The Song of Songs’, in Robert Alter and Frank Kermode (eds.), The Literary Guide to the Bible (London, 1987), 305.

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has done by issuing a note of warning: ‘some Atheists and Sensuall men, shall perhaps turn this grace of God into wantonnesse, to their owne condemnation’: Let no man therefore presume to sing, or repeat in a carnall sense, what is here spiritually intended; upon pain of Gods heavie indignation.108 This attempt at closure really will not do, but the impulse behind it is interesting: Wither was naturally drawn to The Song of Songs, as many seventeenth-century poets were, but in versifying them he was living dangerously, because once they were published they became the property of their readers. Wither pleads for them to be put to ‘pious use’, and records in The Schollers Purgatory what happened to them; Some term them in scorne, WITHERS SONNETS; and some, among them, the better to expresse what opinion they have of their pious use, are pleased to promise that they will procure the roaring Ballett singer with one legg, to sing and sell them about the Citie;—109 Wither's spiritual and typographical essays, prefaced to each text, were an attempt to direct his readers and control interpretation, in the manner of the marginal notes of the Geneva Bible and the brief notes at the head of each metrical psalm. They were the inevitable consequence of attempting to broaden the range of hymnody and psalmody, and to provide an alternative to the Genevan austerity of Sternhold and Hopkins; and they were an early and daring example of the way in which hymns struggle to become independent of metrical psalmody and take risks in the process. Wither's hymns were in perpetual dialogue with The Whole Booke of Psalmes. He sought out defects in it, as other writers did (and the constant sniping at it after 1620 is one reason why that book has never been accorded its rightful praise). His attack on it in The Schollers Purgatory was almost certainly designed to puff his own book. He describes the metrical psalms as being ‘full of absurdities, solecisms, improprieties, nonsense, and impertinent circumlocutions’; he also found the exclusive use of them monotonous, and he speaks of his own attempt at producing variety with a robust common-sense, far removed from the contemplative piety of a George Herbert or a Nicholas Ferrar: If it be but to awaken our dullnes, and take away our wearisomenesse in holy duties, variety is needful. For flesh and bloud (as we find by daily experience) loaths those things, wherewithal they are naturally best pleased, if they be too frequent: how much more tedious then will those things be unto us, which are perpetually iterated in the same words, being naturally unpleasing to a carnall ear?110

108

George Wither, Hymnes and Songs of the Church (London, 1623), 10.

109

The Schollers Purgatory (London, 1624), 10.

110

Ibid. 18–19.


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Wither provides the necessary variety in the second part of Hymnes and Songs of the Church, where he turns to New Testament passages and to Saints' Days. Instead of paraphrasing the New Testament, he versifies the prayers and longings of the individual believer. He applies the image of fire, from Acts 2, to the individual condition: Moreover, let thy heavenly Fire (Enflamed from above) Burn up in us each vaine desire, And warme our hearts with love. In this figurative mode Wither begins to move freely around the Bible in his search for the right image or phrase, as in the final verse of his hymn for Easter Day: Oh, let us praise his Name therefore, (Who thus the upper hand hath wonne) For, we had else, for evermore Been lost, and utterly undone: Whereas this Favour doth allow, That we with bouldnesse thus may sing, Oh Hell, where is thy conquest now? And thou (oh Death), where is thy sting? The last phrase, from 1 Corinthians 15: 55, is used because in these hymns Wither is conscious of the individual singer approaching the message of Easter Day in thankfulness and boldness. The reasons for that boldness are described figuratively—that Christ has won the victory, or upper hand, and that sinners are no longer lost and undone. In this ability to select the appropriate biblical text, and in his use of figurative language to articulate the response of the believer, Wither is anticipating the work of later hymn-writers. A certain plainness suggests a Puritan temper: it helps to explain why Richard Baxter described Wither as ‘honest George Withers’111 and why Wither took up arms on the side of Parliament during the Civil War. It has been remarked by Rosemary Freeman that the poems which were written for his Collection of Emblemes (1635) seem to have been intended for ‘the middle-class reader of a puritanical turn of mind’,112 and this is certainly the case with Britain's Remembrancer (1628), a poem in eight long cantos of heroic couplets describing numerous ways in which ‘The Land is over-spred with wickednesse’.113 Fortunately, it was succeeded by the much more interesting and varied hymn-book, Haleluiah, or, Britain's Second Remembrancer (1641). This volume contains plenty of Puritan simplicity,

111

Richard Baxter, ‘Epistle to the Reader’, Poetical Fragments (1681).

112

Rosemary Freeman, English Emblem Books (London, 1948), 142.

113

George Wither, Britain's Remembrancer (London, 1628), 224.

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but its directness does not mean that Wither's art is unsubtle. Part 3, hymn 60, for example, is entitled ‘For a Poet’, and shows that Wither had a strong sense of vocation, but also a vivid sense of metaphorical fitness—with poetry as the holy singing of the world, and the poet at the centre of it: By Art, a Poet is not made. For (though by Art some better'd be) Immediatlie his gift he had From thee, Oh God! from none but thee: And fitted in the wombe he was, To be (by what thou didst inspire) In extraordinarie place, A Chaplain of this Lower-Quire.— The felicitous use of long words such as ‘Immediatlie’ and ‘extraordinarie’ (so placed in the line that it has six syllables, ‘extra-ordinarie’), and the unusual imagery of the chaplain to the choir, suggest that Wither has freed himself even further from the need to stick closely to the biblical text, and has begun to write religious poetry. It is poetry in a lyrical manner, and frequently directions are given for the particular psalm tune to which a hymn should be sung, which suggests that Wither still had the metrical psalmists and their tunes in his mind. But the biblical adherence of the metrical psalmists is here replaced by a curiously practical imagination, which provides hymns for all sorts and conditions of men and women, and which demonstrates what Charles Lamb later called Wither's hearty homeliness of manner and plain moral speaking'.114 This is shown in Part 2, hymn 61, ‘For them who intend to settle in Virginia, New-England, or the like places’, a hymn which is full of practical wisdom and which imagines the New World as a Puritan opportunity: Oh! let the Sun of Righteousness, Thy Truth, and Grace divine, Within this uncouth Wildernes With brightnes also shine. That we and they whom here we find, May live together so, That one in Faith, and one in mind, We by thy Grace may grow. Wither was tackling the immense problem of colonialism here, with its tensions between those who arrive and the natives who are already on the land: his pious hopes may not have been very helpful, but at least they recognized that there were two parties involved, ‘we’, and ‘they whom here

114

Charles Lamb, ‘On the Poetical Works of George Wither’ (1818), quoted in Freeman, English Emblem Books, 141.


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we find’, both of whom may grow in grace. Part 2 of Haleluiah is full of this applied Christianity: it contains hymns which were designed as ‘a good means to insinuate into persons of every calling and degree, some of those musings and considerations, which are necessary to be remembered’.115 There are poems for Princes, Subjects, Members of Parliament, Magistrates, Masters and Servants, Rich and Poor, Lawyers and Clients, Doctors and Patients, and many others; the collection really does involve the application of religion to daily life and conduct, as the Puritans would have recommended. The Virginia poem suggests that Wither shared some of the interests of Donne, who was closely involved with the Virginia Company and preached to it; and one of Wither's hymns deals with love in the manner of Donne. Entitled ‘For Lovers being constrained to be absent from each other’ (Part 3, hymn 19), it is a version of ‘A Valediction forbidding mourning’ in 7.7.7.7.D. The third verse shows how neatly Wither can re-write Donne: In our flesh, indeed, we finde Sense of that, which we shall misse, But, it is within the minde Where, the essence of it is. Mindes, may with each other stay, When their Bodies are away; And since ours the same can do, Whither from thee can I go?116 This has none of the philosophical exploration or verbal cleverness (‘sense/absence’) of Donne— Dull sublunary lovers love Whose soul is sense, cannot admit Absence— —but Wither succeeds in seeing the relationship as existing in the sight of God and as sanctified by him: Therefore, now no more, lament; What avoyded cannot be: But, in him, remain content, Who endear'd me first to thee: To his Armes I thee bequeath, To be found in life, or death: Where, till I review thy face, Rest, my Dear, in his embrace. The sudden break in the last line, enclosing the endearment, is extremely effective and surprisingly tender after the apparent serenity of the previous

115

George Wither, Haleluiah, or, Britain's Second Remembrancer (London, 1641), 345.

116

In the original text the last word is printed as ‘do’, which I have amended.

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lines, with their regularly patterned four-beats. The other poem for lovers, ‘For Lovers tempted by carnall desires’, possesses none of this charm, but shows once again how Wither could adapt the work of others, in this case Ben Jonson (and before him Catullus): Come, sweet-heart, come, let us prove, Whilst we may the joyes of Love— The invitation continues pressingly for two stanzas, only to be broken off short by another voice, reproving, in verse 3: Thus, the carnall-dotard sings; Wooing shades, as reall things— The stern voice of authority breaks in gratingly here, as a Puritan dictate on morals and manners; Wither's poetry in Haleluiah is frequently dramatic and didactic in this way, especially in the third part, where those whose personal condition is addressed are often the speakers. Of particular interest, given the publication date of 1641, is the hymn ‘For a member of the Parliament’ (Part 3, hymn 5), to be sung ‘as the 4 Psalm’, in which the singer prays to be able ‘to serve the Common-weale’, And, so to serve, that, their offence, (At all times) I may shun, Who serve it so, as if the Prince And Kingdome, were not one. The title-page of Haleluiah describes it as being composed ‘in a three-fold Volume’, like the three-fold knot of the Holy Trinity. The three parts, however, are less Trinitarian than experiential, dealing with people at different times. They are entitled ‘Hymns Occasionall’, ‘Hymns Temporary’, and ‘Hymns Personal’: the first are for occasions, some secular and some religious—going on a journey, meeting, parting, getting up, going to bed, thanksgiving, praying; the second are for times, and hence temporary—days of the week, seasons of the year, Church festivals, and saints' days; the third are for different persons, in many walks of life and different professions. The three parts together are described as ‘bringing to Remembrance (in praisefull and Poenitentiall Hymns, Spiritual Songs, and Moral-Odes), Meditations, advancing the glory of God, in the practice of Pietie and Vertue’. His emphasis on meditation and on practical piety and virtue is characteristic of his age (Baxter's works were later to be known as ‘Practical Writings’), and so is his dedication (‘To the thrice Honorable, the high Courts of Parliament, now assembled, in the Triple-Empire of the British-Isles’) and his Puritan condemnation of contemporary behaviour: ‘For, so innumerable are the foolish and prophane Songs now delighted in (to the dishonour of our Language and Religion) that Haleluiahs, and pious


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Meditations are almost out of use and fashion.’117 The knowledge of this context of profane song sharpens an appreciation of the first hymn in the book, which is one of Wither's hymns that has survived into the present century. It was reprinted in Haleluiah from its earlier appearance, in a slightly different form, at the beginning of A Preparation to the Psalter, where it was called ‘A Sonnet, Wherein all Creatures are Provoked to Joyne Together, in Praise of their Almightie Creator’, and began ‘Come, O Come with Sacred Layes’. In Haleluiah it makes a fine opening: Come, oh come in pious Laies, Sound we God-almighti's praise. Hither bring in one Consent, Heart, and Voice, and Instrument. Wither is asking, as the earlier version made clear, for sacred song: the word which surprises in the first line is ‘pious’, which now has overtones of humbug but which in Wither's day was a decent alternative to profane. It takes its place in the assured regularity of the verse, which is a marching trochaic with an extra syllable on the end, making a strong line of seven syllables and four beats. The stresses fall exactly into place: Sound we God-almighti's praise— Heart, and Voice, and Instrument— each syllable of ‘Instrument’ is given its proper value; the rhythm is quickly established as a firm and undeviating one, though flexible enough to accommodate enjambement: From Earths vast and hollow wombe, Musicks deepest Base may come. Seas and Flouds, from shore to shoare, Shall their Counter-Tenors roare, To this Consort (when we sing) Whistling Winds your Descants bring. That our Song may over clime, All the Bounds of Place and Time, And ascend from Sphere to Sphere, To the great Allmightie's eare. Just as the first verse had brought together ‘Heart, and Voice, and Instrument’ in a significant triplet, so there is now a consort of three voices, bass, counter-tenor, and descant, drawn from the whole of nature and transcending the bounds of space and time. The vision of universal harmony comes from the imagery, and from the rhetorical figure of hyperbole, but the sense of a satisfying musical whole also comes from the firm rhythm and from the

117

‘Preface’, Haleluiah, unpaginated.

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delicate variations of tone and tempo. The verses are of ten lines, usually in couplets: the couplets form a catena or chain, each link being separate yet all coming together—both through the sense and the rhythmical pattern. Wither's hymn thus works out the miracle of harmony in its own organization: the units are separate, yet also together: heart, voice, instrument; bass, counter-tenor, descant. The harmony is built up from separate sounds, heard successively and in combination: in the same way, the parts, the instruments, and all the elements of nature combine in a great vision of universal harmony: Lowly pipe, ye Wormes that creep, On the Earth, or in the Deep. Loud-aloft, your Voices strain, Beasts, and Monsters of the Main. Birds, your warbling Treble sing; Clouds, your Peales of Thunders ring.— The creatures and elements are separate, yet they are also part of the great process of praise: so too the couplets are separated, and yet joined to each other by analogy, integrated into the verse by sense and parallel syntax. The vision is completed in the final verse, where the crescendo is made by allowing the two-line units to become more subtly connected. The grammar becomes less a matter of parallels and becomes more of a rolling series: So, from Heaven, on Earth, he shall Let his gracious Blessings fall: And this huge wide Orbe, we see Shall one Quire, one Temple be; Where, in such a Praise, full Tone We will sing, what he hath done,— This climax is one in which the different parts, instruments, poetic lines, are fused together, with the full tone of the instrument, the full heart, the full voice, the whole earth together as one choir singing one song. It realizes the invitation of the first verse: Hither bring in one Consent where the word ‘Consent’ means ‘harmony’ or ‘concord’, as it does in Milton's ‘At a Solemn Musick’. Milton's poem is very different from Wither's hymn, not least in its fluid rhythms and long sustained passages; but the two poems depend ultimately upon the same idea of world harmony (musica mundana) and the related idea of human harmony (musica humana),118 although Milton is more conscious of the Fall, when

118

See John Hollander, The Untuning of the Sky (Princeton, 1971).


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disproportion'd sin Jarr'd against natures chime, and with harsh din Broke the fair musick that all creatures made To their great Lord, whose love their motion sway'd In perfect Diapason,— The rolling organ music of Milton's lines is very different from Wither's formal couplets, but in their different ways both poets make their lines enact the harmony of which they speak. In Wither's case the influence is not that of Milton (whose poem he is unlikely to have known) but Shakespeare, in A Midsummer Night's Dream, where Wither could have found both the rhythm (in Puck's speeches) and his reference to the ‘whistling wind’. But Wither is interested in sacred lays: it is interesting to find in his Collection of Emblemes two different examples of instruments in the rendering of love, one a lute held by a winged cupid, the other a harp played by a religious figure, probably King David. Wither's Puritan seriousness is tempered by a natural cheerfulness which keeps breaking in, and a tenderness which is found in some of his hymns about childbirth and babies. In ‘A Rocking Hymn’, the swaying movement of the Long Metre is followed by a rocking couplet: Sweet Baby, sleep: what ailes my Dear? What ailes my Darling thus to cry? Be still, my Childe, and lend thine ear, To heare me sing thy Lullaby. My pretty Lambe forbear to weep: Be still my Dear; sweet Babie, sleep.— Whil'st thus, thy Lullabie, I sing, For thee, great Blessings ripening be: Thine Eldest Brother is a King; And hath a Kingdome bought for thee. Sweet Babie, then, forbear to weep; Be still, my Babe; sweet Babie sleep. The mother's natural wish that the baby would stop crying and go to sleep is here delicately linked with the gospel message and with the Incarnation, as it is later in Isaac Watts's ‘Cradle Song’. Such humanity—what Lamb called Wither's ‘homeliness’—makes his hymns in Haleluiah rich with confusions and despairs, in a manner and metre which is like Herbert (though Herbert would not have cared to express the self-pity): Where is now? where is, alas? Time, that was? Where are all those hopes bestowed, And those pleasing Dayes, wherein, I have bin

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Youths beguiling Pleasure showed? Must I! must, I now (thought I) Helplesse Die? And, be carelesse left, tomorrow; In a dark, and lonely grave? The sharp questions, and the pressing urgency of the approach of death, are sharpened by the use of short and long lines: they suggest the unevenness of the soul's emotional course, as the metres of Herbert's ‘Deniall’ or ‘Good Friday’ do. Songs of Praise printed three of Wither's hymns, ‘To God with heart and cheerful voice’, ‘Behold the sun that seem'd but now’, and a vigorous rendering of Psalm 148, ‘The Lord of heaven confess’, written to John Pullain's traditional metre for that psalm. The second verse shows Wither at his best: Praise God from earth below, Ye dragons and ye deeps; Fire, hail, clouds, wind, and snow, Whom in command he keeps. Praise ye his name, Hills great and small Trees low and tall; Beasts wild and tame. As in ‘Come, O come in pious lays’, Wither's particular strength is his ability to include everything in his overview, to give a portrayal of the world as a living and breathing entirety. The important word in verse 1 is ‘all’: the psalm uses it again and again—‘all his angels . . . all his hosts . . . all ye stars of light . . . all deeps . . . all hills . . . all cattle’. Wither enumerates the vast forces of the universe in the same way—sun, moon, stars, sky—and in verse 2 he emphasizes that all hills, all trees, all beasts are included—great and small, low and tall, wild and tame. Wither attempted to extend the liturgical repertoire. His attacks on the metrical psalms show what he was trying to do, and the difficulties in which he found himself—difficulties of reading and interpretation—show exactly why Calvin and his followers insisted on metrical psalms only. And tire-some and Puritanical though Wither occasionally is, he began something interesting—exploring the possibilities of figurative language in expressing prayer and praise, and writing hymns about the application of religious principles to the conduct of daily life. He argued strongly for an extension of the methods of the metrical psalmists to other texts—‘all the other Canonical Hymnes do admyrablie help towards Gods everlasting mercies, and for illustrating those particular Misteries of our christian fayth.’119

119

George Wither, The Schollers Purgatory (London, 1624), 20.


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To those who condemned his initiatives, he responded with a sturdy defence: No holy scripture, or canon of our Church, hath commaunded the keeping of this, or that part of Gods Booke, from publike use: and therefore, why should any disallow free passage to those Hymnes in their proper kinde?120 His reading of Donne, Herbert, and Ben Jonson no doubt assisted him in expressing, less effectively than they, the movements of the religious and emotional spirit; from them, too, he may have picked up some of the practices of Counter-Reformation devotion. But his simplicity and directness, and his robust originality, together with his seriousness of purpose, point the way towards the Puritan hymnology of the later seventeenth century.

Donne and Herbert Wither's departure from the psalm tradition, and his rendering of individual disquiet and spiritual conflict, is a reminder that the beginnings of hymn-writing are inevitably associated with the work of his contemporaries: not just because their poems have been used as hymns, but because some of them were written as hymns, and because their example encouraged others to write about the inner life. Donne, for instance, wrote his ‘Hymne to God the Father’, and then had it set to music, so that, as Isaak Walton records, the poem became a hymn: he caus'd it to be set to a most grave and solemn Tune, and to be often sung to the Organ by the Choristers of St Paul's Church, in his own hearing; especially at the Evening Service, and at his return from his Customary Devotions in that place, did occasionally say to a friend, The words of the Hymn have restored to me the same thoughts of joy that possessed my Soul in my sickness when I composed it. And, O the power of Church-musick! that Harmony added to this Hymn has raised the Affections of my heart, and quickned my graces of zeal and gratitude;—121 Donne's poetry was frequently associated with music, although Winifred Maynard has suggested that he had no aptitude for writing words for tunes; she singles out this hymn as the one occasion when Donne ‘observed a strophic discipline that both served to express its chastened spirit and opened the way for musical setting’:122

120

Ibid. 58.

121

Isaak Walton, The Lives of Donne, Wotton, Hooker, Herbert and Sanderson, ed. S. B. Carter (London, 1951), 43–4.

122

Winifred Maynard, Elizabethan Lyric Poetry and Its Music (Oxford, 1986), 148–9. The form of Donne's poem has some affinities with the pavan—‘a kind of staid music ordained for grave dancing and most commonly made of three strains, whereof every strain is played or sung twice’ (Thomas Morley, Preface to A Plain and Easy Introduction to Practical Music (1597); quoted in Maynard, 116).

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Wilt thou forgive that sinne, where I begunne, Which was my sin, though it were done before? Wilt thou forgive that sinne, through which I runne, And do run still: though still I do deplore? When thou hast done, thou hast not done, For, I have more. The first couplet sets out the rhythm, and the second couplet follows it; after that there is a repetition with antithesis—‘When thou hast done, thou hast not done’—followed by a short coda, of the kind frequently found in Elizabethan lyrics (see, for example, the anonymous ‘Weep you no more, sad fountains’ or Wyatt's ‘What should I say?’). In every case the last line is a delicate closing of the verse, which would have been matched by a closing musical phrase: the art lies in bringing the parallel stanzas to the same point in each verse. Donne uses the same idea, with two refrains and a counter-refrain. The beauty of this hymn is found in its use of such grave and graceful repetitions to articulate the recurring patterns of sin and forgiveness. The same use of repetition and delicate rhythm is found in Herbert, who (according to Walton) was ‘a most excellent Master’ in music, ‘and did himself compose many divine Hymns and Anthems, which he set and sung to his Lute or Viol’.123 What these are we do not know, for there are no hymns, as such, in The Temple, published in 1633 after Herbert's death. There is one metrical psalm, which is of considerable interest, because it shows how beautifully Herbert could develop the form, and with what a musical sense: The God of love my shepherd is, And he that doth me feed: While he is mine, and I am his, What can I want or need? It is interesting to compare this with William Whittingham's version from The Whole Booke of Psalmes, which Herbert knew (he borrows the second line intact): The Lord is only my support, and he that doth me feed, How can I then lack any thing whereof I stand in need? Herbert adds the crucial words ‘of love’ in the first line, and prefers the image of the shepherd (from the Book of Common Prayer) to Whittingham's translation of the Vulgate, ‘Dominus regit me’. It is fitting that Herbert should have made these changes, because his choice of this psalm is

123

Izaak Walton, The Lives of Donne. . ., 241.


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deliberately made to show the loving care of God as shepherd and provider. At the same time, Herbert's love of music, which is mentioned by Walton and confirmed by his poem ‘Church-musick’, is signalled by the line ‘While he is mine, and I am his’, which is a quotation from The Song of Songs (2: 16—‘My beloved is mine, and I am his’), used also by Sidney.124 The rhythm picks up the regular four-beat stresses of ‘The God of love my shepherd is’, and establishes the essential rhythm; and the crossing between he-mine and I-his signifies all the giving and receiving that is to go on in the poem. It is principally a giving from God—‘He leads me’, ‘I stray . . . he doth convert’; but the final verse returns to the exchange that is due, human praise as the response to divine love: And as it never shall remove, So neither shall my praise. The zeugma here links both ‘it’ [‘wondrous love’] and ‘my praise’, governing them both by the verb ‘remove’. It is part of a rhetorical structure which is determinedly zeugmatic throughout the poem, in this case uniting human and divine under one verb. It occurs earlier in And all this not for my desert, But for his holy name— where ‘my desert’ and ‘his holy name’ are opposites, human and divine, linked by the structure of the verse. In association with the zeugmas, there is another figure, that of doubling, which emphasizes the overflowing abundance of divine providence. One of the words which signals it is ‘both’: He leads me to the tender grasse, Where I both feed and rest; Then to the streams that gently passe: In both I have the best. The poet both feeds and rests, at the streams and on the grass: later he is able to ‘sit and dine’, and the verb ‘runnes over’ links both ‘My head with oyl, my cup with wine’, doing so ‘day and night’. Such abundance comes from one whose love is ‘sweet and wondrous’ and whose rod (to guide) and staff (to bear) are linked by another omitted zeugma (‘are with me’). The paraphrase is thus a dense interweaving of human and divine qualities, grammatically and rhetorically expressing the abundant love of God and the responding devotion of the reader or singer. Similarly musical, though rhythmically more unusual, is the first poem of Herbert's to be used for church singing in anything like its original form (in Church Hymns, 1871). This is ‘Antiphon (I)’, which has become a hymn of praise in spite of

124

Sidney, ‘My true love hath my hart, and I have his’, The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. William A. Ringler, Jr. (Oxford, 1962), 75.

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its unusual rhythms, in which one choir sings 10.4 and the other 6.6.6.6. The ‘Chorus’ comes first: Let all the world in ev'ry corner sing, My God and King. followed by the verse: The heav'ns are not too high, His praise may thither flie: The earth is not too low, His praises there may grow. The plainness is the message: as Herbert writes in ‘Jordan (I)’: I envie no mans nightingale or spring; Nor let them punish me with losse of rime, Who plainly say, My God, My King. The simplicity is defiant, even shocking if we try to recapture some of its original force (in the hymn the use of a foursyllable line after the ten-syllable first line assists this). It is a plainness which comes from the direct quotation from the Bible (Psalm 145: 1) unadorned and unmediated. But the plainness is then followed by a kind of theological cosmology that takes up the witty reference to the corners of the world. Now the reader is concerned with high and low: Herbert is taking the Psalmist's ‘as the heavens are high above the earth’ and modifying it to give hope—the heavens are ‘not too high’, the earth is ‘not too low’. The rhymes are in strong opposition—the ‘i’ of high/flie against the ‘o’ of low/ grow, but Herbert then pulls them towards each other by the important parallel constructions—‘not too high (but that) his praise may flie’, ‘not too low (but that) his praises may grow’. On the earth his praises are plural, the praises of each individual, and also many different praises from each, which blend to form the chorus of universal praise, in the singular. It is this transition from plural to singular, so easily overlooked, that is carried over into verse 2, where the principal interaction is between the Church, shouting its psalms of praise, and the heart: it is the individual heart, the heart which ‘above all’ has to ‘bear the longest part’, to carry the principal load in the architecture of the religious life, and also, in musical terms, be the instrument or singer with the longest part. Thus from ‘Let all the world’, Herbert has reminded us that the centrally important origin of all praise is in the inner spiritual life of the believer: and then the chorus is repeated: Let all the world in ev'ry corner sing, My God and King to round off the complex interactions from the heart back to the world, the world depending on the heart. So the hymn tosses its ideas backwards and


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forwards between one choir and another (which is what an ‘Antiphon’ does), between high and low, between the church and the heart, between the individual believer and the world: only one thing remains separate and constant, and that is the object of all praise, given a line to itself, ‘My God and King’. Herbert's use of the word ‘King’ is one of his many metaphors for God, found obviously (though containing a hidden typology) in another of his poems which has been widely used as a hymn: King of Glorie, King of Peace, I will love thee: And that love may never cease, I will move thee. Thou hast granted my request, Thou hast heard me: Thou didst note my working breast, Thou hast spar'd me. As Rosemond Tuve has noted, the phrase ‘King of Peace’ is taken from Hebrews 7: 2, where it is applied to Melchisidec, and this is a poem for the Holy Communion.125 But not only is it typologically clever; it is also rhetorically spectacular. The repetition of ‘King’ in the first line signals the beginning of a poem which is marked by the skilful use of such repetitions, either by the return of identical words, or by words and phrases that are slightly but significantly different. Thus ‘King . . . King’ are the same, but ‘love . . . love’ are different, because one is a verb and the other a noun; the mind registers the alteration of grammatical pattern, just as it registers the closeness of lines 2 and 4, which differ by one letter only. Herbert has indicated that this is to be a poem with its own strong rhetorical patterns: the second verse uses the figure of anaphora, beginning three lines with ‘Thou hast’, and all the lines with ‘Thou’, while a later verse features the unusual Epanalepsis, ‘when ye make one worde both beginne and end your verse’:126 Sev'n whole dayes, not one in seven, I will praise thee. But the chief delight of this poem is in the effect of playing games with words in the short lines. Again and again they are different by one or two

125

Rosemond Tuve, A Reading of George Herbert (London, 1952), 71: ‘Few could be unaware that Melchisidec the Priest-King prefigured Christ in his character as the Eucharist; Melchisidec's action in giving bread and wine to Abraham is the Old Testament type of Christ's feeding of His Church, and Christ is the God who nourishes, the Priest who officiates, the King, and the sacrifice (the Body, Bread, spiritual food) which is eaten. This is a Holy Communion poem . . . . ’

126

George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge, 1936), 200.

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letters only, but the differences carry the significant spirituality of the poem, its eucharistic message— I will love thee— I will move thee— Thou didst cleare me— Thou didst heare me— To enroll thee— To extoll thee— The rhymes contain Herbert's eucharistic gospel of faith, penitence, forgiveness, and praise. The poem uses the 7.4.7.4. rhythm to emphasize Herbert's favourite unit of plainness, the four-syllable line; it also uses the pattern to give the poem its particular springy effect. This (together with the familiar tune) helps to explain the hymn's continued popularity in spite of its unexpected phrases and archaic words— Small it is, in this poore sort To enroll thee— where ‘enroll’ means, principally, ‘celebrate’—in this poor sort (‘manner’), although there is also a suggestion that God is being ‘enrolled’ in the poem itself, which is a poor sort of poem. Also unexpected is the ‘working breast’, metonymically used for a person agitated by strong emotion; whereas, in the next verse, ‘the cream of all my heart’ is an image from milk which has settled. The contemporary singer registers these, and phrases such as ‘I will move thee’, as unusual and unexpected, no longer the normal language of worship but figurative, rhetorical, and deviating from the norm. It is ‘roughened language’, providing such images for the spiritual life that sharpen the apprehension as an illustration from a sermon or a parable might do. Indeed the influences on Herbert include not only the psalms but also the parables, with their homespun imagery, and the visual images from emblem books. The image of cream in ‘King of Glorie, King of Peace’ is an example of the way in which, as Rosemary Freeman has noted, the connection between The Temple and emblem books ‘is expressed in Herbert's whole method of accumulating and interpreting images’.127 The poems of Donne and Herbert (and of Vaughan, some of whose religious lyrics have also been used as hymns, such as ‘My soul, there is a country’) are of considerable wit, by poets of great distinction, products of what Herbert saw as the baptized imagination. That phrase is crystallized and crucial: the poetry is Christian, baptized into a new life and declaring the joys and difficulties of the faith, but it is also the poetry of the imagination.

127

Freeman, English Emblem Books, 155.


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These are not poems designed to versify the Bible and make it memorable, or intended (as Wither's were) to be an addition to the liturgical resources of the Church. They are rather testimonies to the human and imaginative workings of the poetic mind, written not for a hymn-book but as ‘Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations’ (a subtitle used by Herbert and by Vaughan). The religious poetry which was taken over and used in hymn-books is important in the history of hymnody, because it added personal and devotional elements to the tradition of biblical paraphrase. Although poets such as Donne and Herbert were influenced by meditative traditions and practices, often those of pre-Reformation and CounterReformation figures,128 it has also been convincingly argued by Barbara Keifer Lewalski that any inheritance of Augustinian or Ignatian meditative practices and techniques was modified and transformed by the traditions of biblical poetics, individual engagement, and Protestant aesthetics.129 The poetry of Donne and Herbert is the result of an engagement with Holy Scripture, with the world, and with the inner self—the heart, of which Herbert writes so frequently and so touchingly. Human experience, religious poetry, spiritual development; these concerns are mediated through what Lewalski describes as ‘emerging Protestant kinds’ of meditation: ‘deliberate meditation on scripture texts, meditation on the creatures, occasional meditation, meditation on personal experience, heavenly meditation’.130 It belongs to the broad pattern of the Elizabethan settlement, and not to any particular ecclesiastical party: it concentrated attention on the conduct of life, on the Bible, and on the self. From the Bible came the awareness of ‘biblical poetics’, the understanding of ways in which language (including figures and tropes) could be used to express religious truth; there was an intense and excited interest in scripture metaphors, as Benjamin Keach's work shows.131 From the Bible also came the materials for the understanding of the self: ‘from Paul's epistles, the Protestant extrapolated a paradigm against which to plot the spiritual drama of his own life’.132 This involved the recognition of human beings as fallen, yet redeemed by Divine Grace, mediated through the merits and death of Christ and felt through the power of the Holy Spirit. The key terms were election, calling, justification, adoption, sanctification, and glorification, and together they made up a powerful series of stages in the psycho-drama of the soul, one which continued to be found in much of the finest hymn-writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

128

Louis L. Martz, The Poetry of Meditation (rev. edn., New Haven and London, 1962), 258.

129

See Lewalski, Protestant Poetics, passim.

130

Ibid. 11.

131

Keach produced an immense work entitled Tropologia, or a Key to Open Scripture Metaphors (1681), and wrote continually about ‘Parables and Similitudes’. See below, Ch. 6.

132

Lewalski, Protestant Poetics, 15.

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The other consequence of Herbert's writing was to encourage others. It is almost as if the publication of The Temple released writers from an inhibition, from the fear of being thought to be writing poems for their own glory rather than for God's (a fear articulated movingly in Marvell's ‘The Coronet’, where the poet speaks of ‘wreaths of fame and interest’). After Herbert, hymn-writer after hymn-writer—Crossman, Baxter, Keach, Bunyan—quotes the lines from the first verse of Herbert's ‘The Church-porche’: A verse may finde him, who a sermon flies, And turn delight into a sacrifice. Herbert's influence upon later writers was pervasive, engaging the admiration of Puritans and High-Churchmen alike. Richard Baxter thought that ‘He speaks to God like one that really believeth in God, and whose business in this world is most with God’.133 His poems were quarried again and again for material for hymns: in 1697 a volume appeared entitled Select Hymns Taken out of Mr Herbert's Temple & Turned into Common Metre, and in 1737 John Wesley re-versified some of his poems for his first hymn-book, A Collection of Psalms and Hymns, turning them into singable blocks of Common Metre but losing the fine unity of sense and line and verse which makes Herbert's poetry so distinctive and moving.134

Henry Vaughan Vaughan was Herbert's closest follower,135 whose awareness of spiritual health was linked to his interest in medicine. He translated a work, Hermetical Physick, which deals not only with preventive medicine of a traditional kind (ways of staying healthy) but which also proposed a kind of natural medicine, produced ‘by our internal natural Alchymist’.136 This may seem eccentric, an undercurrent of strange alchemical and hermetic thinking beneath the orthodox and scriptural religion of the seventeenth century; but it permits an imaginative apprehension of unusual connections, so that Vaughan can write: Leave then thy foolish ranges For none can thee secure But one, who never changes, Thy God, thy life, thy cure.

133

Richard Baxter, ‘Epistle to the Reader’, Poetical Fragments (1681).

134

John Wesley later did better service to Herbert by printing Select Parts of Mr Herbert's Sacred Poems (1773), with the texts in their original form.

135

See F. E. Hutchinson's Preface to The Works of George Herbert (Oxford, 1941), p. xlii, referring to Vaughan: ‘There is no example in English literature of one poet adopting another's work so extensively.’

136

The Works of Henry Vaughan, ed. L. C. Martin (Oxford, 1914), ii. 582.


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God is the cure: he is, in Vaughan's conclusion to Hermetical Physick, ‘the Supreme, All-mighty Physician’,137 and the word ‘cure’, which has a particular prominence in the poem—as the unexpected final word—has a specific resonance, which spreads back through the earlier verses. Vaughan is giving advice on holistic medicine, with God as the cure for those diseases which hurt the body and torment the soul. Vaughan's medical knowledge was one of his many interests, which are pressed into service, often unexpectedly, in his poetry. In particular, his sense of nature as something wonderful and mysterious, governed by forces which we cannot fully apprehend, is strongly felt. Nature is interpreted, in S. L. Bethell's words, ‘as both signifying and actually embodying the mysterious operations of the Holy Spirit’: Nature itself was valued by them [Henry and Thomas Vaughan] not so much for its appearance as for its sacramental significance: seen in the light of Revelation it shadowed forth in its constant self-renewal that final transmutation into glory for which it, together with the elect, groaned and travailed in earnest expression.138 So at moments of heavenly inspiration, when ‘my soul breakes, and buds’,139 the whole earth seems filled with glory: such glimpses of perfection are the soul's happiness and health, its life-blood, although Vaughan, like Herbert, is well aware of other moods, as he shows in ‘Unprofitablenes’.140 His addresses to his own soul employ different images to portray its problems: one is its failure to bear fruit, and its dried-up, wintry state; another is the common image of the soul in pilgrimage, wandering and thirsty; a third is the image of disease. All come together in that holistic poem which has become Vaughan's best-known hymn: My Soul, there is a Countrie Far beyond the stars, Where stands a winged Centrie All skillful in the wars, There above noise, and danger Sweet peace sits crown'd with smiles,— The remoteness of the country—far beyond the stars, above noise and danger—is fundamental to the contrast between ‘there’ and ‘here’: here, by implication, there is noise, and danger; here there are wars, and roses that wither:

137

Ibid. 582. See also Elizabeth Holmes, Henry Vaughan and the Hermetic Philosophy (Oxford, 1932: repr. New York, 1967).

138

S. L. Bethell, ‘The Theology of Henry and Thomas Vaughan’, Theology, 61 (1953), 137–43.

139

See ‘The Morning-Watch’: ‘O how it blouds | And Spirits all my Earth! he ark! in what Rings | And Hymning Circulations the quick world | Awakes, and sings;’—

140

See Ross Garner, The Unprofitable Servant in Henry Vaughan (Lincoln, Nebr., 1963), passim.

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If thou canst get but thither, There grows the flowre of peace, The Rose that cannot wither, Thy fortresse, and thy ease— Here everything is changeable, insecure; people ‘range’ foolishly; here they are asleep (‘O my soul awake!’). In the other country, there stands a sentry, who is skilful in war, and there is clearly some kind of army, and a fortress; but in spite of, or perhaps because of, the sentry, the country is at peace, commanded by ‘one born in a Manger’ who looks over the assembled ranks, the ‘beauteous files’. This is a country where the armies are those of peace, needed only to keep out evil; and in it ‘Sweet peace sits crown'd with smiles’—peace is the king here, but the king crowned not with gold but with the smiles of happiness and love (it is possible that Vaughan had a particular perception of the value of peace and a deep longing for it, writing as he was in the aftermath of the Civil War141). The distance between that country at peace and an earth torn with civil strife is enormous, and the features of life on earth, as we have seen, are those of noise, danger, transience, insecurity, and indirection. At the centre of the poem, however, is the reminder that the soul should constantly be awake to the knowledge of the Redemption, which at one point in history joined the two vastly different worlds: He is thy gracious friend, And (O my Soul awake!) Did in pure love descend To die here for thy sake,— It is this which has made heaven accessible, so that the poet can suggest the possibility (with a conditional ‘If ’): If thou canst get but thither,— and it is the sense of direction and purpose which causes him to instruct the soul to ‘Leave then thy foolish ranges’: the soul's only direction should be towards God, who is life, who has a sentry guarding his peace, and who descended to earth as a child in a manager to save mankind. God is thus ‘thy life’, and he is also ‘thy cure’—from Psalm 103: 3–4, where the benefits of God are celebrated: Who forgiveth all thine iniquities: who healeth all thy diseases. Who redeemeth thy life from destruction; who crowneth thee with lovingkindness and tender mercies;— The poem is thus about ‘Peace’ (its title in Silex Scintillans) in more than one sense. It is about a country at peace, watchful against evil, about a soul

141

See Christopher Hill, ‘Henry Vaughan’, in The Collected Essays of Christopher Hill, i, Writing and Revolution in 17th-Century England (Brighton, 1985), 207–25.


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urged to seek its peace with God, and to make peace with God. It is about the actual and the ideal: it sets out human folly (if only by implication, and by the reference to ‘foolish ranges’) and portrays a God who heals, forgives, redeems life from destruction, and crowns the soul with lovingkindness even as sweet peace sits crowned with smiles. ‘Peace’ is the poem by Vaughan which is most frequently found in hymn-books. There are also versions of psalms, most notably of Psalm 121 in Common Metre, which appeared in Songs of Praise: Up to those bright, and gladsome hills Whence flowes my weal, and mirth, I look, and sigh for him, who fils (Unseen,) both heaven, and earth. Even in a verse as simple as this, Vaughan's individuality as a poet can be felt. His paraphrase sharpens the sense of ‘felt life’ by deft touches, such as ‘those . . . hills’, which suggests that he is looking at an actual sunlit landscape, and by the double verb, ‘I look, and sigh’, which suggests the longing of the soul even as it gazes on such beauty. The beauty of the bright and gladsome hills is itself a manifestation of the God for whom the poet longs, who is ‘(Unseen,)’, even as his beauty fills the earth. The psalm has become not just a celebration of God as protector, but Vaughan's joyful witness to God's presence everywhere, his providential care in the beauty of the hills and in the contraries of sun and shade. The operation of such providence through opposites is seen in his most striking departure from the original psalm, which occurs in the final verse: Whether abroad, amidst the Crowd, Or els within my door, He is my Pillar, and my Cloud, Now, and for evermore. By introducing the image of the pillar of the cloud, which guided the children of Israel, Vaughan is following the psalmic tradition of using the Exodus as evidence of God's presence and providence (as in Psalm 78), but in that image he draws together the poem's themes with consummate skill. The Lord went before the children of Israel ‘by day in a pillar of cloud . . . and by night in a pillar of fire’ (Exodus 13: 21), just as, in Vaughan's psalm, he is both weal and mirth, help and hope, sun and shade; and also he is unseen, and the pillar of cloud was the form in which God appeared to Moses in holiness and mystery (Exodus 33: 9). From the poem's beginning in the Breconshire landscape with its sunlit hills, Vaughan has created a profound meditation on the power, omnipresence, and providence of the unseen God, as manifested in history and in his own experience. The poets studied in this chapter, and especially Herbert, make an important contribution to the development of English hymnody, just as

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their poems make a distinctive and distinguished element in any hymn-book. They take up the traditions of liturgical practice, especially in the Holy Communion, and of religious poetry, from the medieval lyric to the metrical psalm; but they add to these their own individual voices, and show how language and symbol, rhythm and metre, can be used to describe the spiritual condition in all its uncertainty and instability. Rosemond Tuve, tracing the origins of Herbert's ‘The Sacrifice’ in liturgy and medieval lyric, stresses his unique and individual quality: Tone of voice is a component of meaning. The intermarriage of word with word can be inexhaustibly fecund; scarcely one of Herbert's ancient images but shows it, and only an original poet has this power to marry just those words which will generate new energies out of their intercourse with each other.142 These poets generate new energies from ancient symbols and simple words: they show later writers how to record the relationship between the soul and God, the deepest thoughts and feelings of a religious sensibility. In their work there is a consciousness of human sin and failure, of longing and unprofitableness, but also a vision of holiness and wonder, a sense of the joy of the forgiven and redeemed soul; and this is produced without necessarily having recourse to wit, or conceits, or other linguistic and artistic subtleties. As Herbert says in ‘Jordan (I)’, Shepherds are honest people; let them sing:— and these poets show later hymn-writers how to be honest: they write of religious experience with an authenticity which showed poets such as Charles Wesley and Cowper how to express the paradoxes, confusions, and oscillations of the Christian faith with a dramatic and immediate effect.

142

Tuve, A Reading of George Herbert, 80.

5 The Seventeenth-Century Anglican Tradition a diall for the houres of prayer It has been suggested that the metrical psalms, with their versification of the Bible, together with the other passages such as the Veni Creator, the Benedictus, and the Nunc Dimittis printed in The Whole Booke of Psalmes, began a tradition which developed into the English hymn, and which was added to by the development of the religious lyric. That development brought together many different kinds of belief and worship, fusing meditative practice and Protestant hermeneutics to provide a form of individual religious expression that could be, and sometimes was, set to music. And because the psalms were also expressions of personal emotion, of tribulation and despair, of the transience of human life and the greatness of God, they have much in common with the seventeenth-century religious poem. What began to be different, as the Reformation progressed on its tangled and complex way, was the style and treatment of religious matters: on the one hand were the Puritans, ‘the hotter sort of protestants’;143 on the other those who may loosely be called Anglicans. This chapter and the next will be concerned with the hymnody of these two traditions, existing uneasily together and finally taking sides against one another in the Civil War and its aftermath. I have used the term ‘Anglican’ in this chapter heading loosely and anachronistically, following the examples of Patrick Collinson and Horton Davies.144 It is intended to refer to those hymn-writers who remained within the Church of England (with one brief exception) during a period of considerable political and religious disturbance. These hymnwriters form no ‘school’, and are best described by what they were not: they were not Puritans, who regarded the Reformation as half-completed, and who wished to abolish established practices of Church worship and the authority

143

Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London, 1967), 27.

144

Ibid.; Horton Davies, Worship and Theology in England from Andrewes to Baxter and Fox, 1603–1690 (Princeton, 1975).

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SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ANGLICAN TRADITION

of bishops; nor were they primarily poets. They were Church of England clergymen, who wrote poetry to be sung, and whose work deserves to be seen as hymnody because its expression of belief can be used (and in Cosin's case certainly was) in worship. Cosin, who was an outstanding liturgist, stands somewhat apart from the other three: he fell foul of the Puritans when he attempted to reorder worship and beautify churches. Crossman, on the other hand, was closer to Baxter and the Presbyterians, and became one of the ejected clergy in 1662, though he later conformed. Ken was a high-principled chaplain and bishop, and Mason an eccentric country vicar. Each of them produced one hymn (in Ken's case two) that has become an essential part of the tradition of Protestant worship.

John Cosin Cosin is a good example of someone who attracted the anger of the Puritans. He looked back to an earlier tradition of monastic prayer and discipline in A Collection of Private Devotions in the Practise of the Antient Church, called, The Hours of Prayers, published in 1627: he was practising order and regularity, in what one Puritan, Henry Burton, scornfully dismissed as ‘a diall for the houres of prayer’, and ‘bringing in Monkerie’;145 another, William Prynne, entitled his pamphlet on the subject A Briefe Survey and Censure of Mr Cozens his Cozening Devotions. Cosin's book takes its structure from the canonical hours, and Cosin, following Hooker, clearly saw it as providing a necessary order and discipline in personal religion. The Private Devotions begins with Calendars of Saints' Days, Moveable Feasts, and Fast days; with other prefatory matter, frequently numerological, including lists of the Ten Commandments, the Three Theological Virtues, the Seven Deadly Sins, the Four Last Things, the Eight Beatitudes, and the Seven Gifts of the Holy Ghost. The main body of the book is preceded by Preparatory Prayers, where there is the first of a number of hymns scattered through the work, ‘A Divine Hymne preparative to Prayer’. It is written in ten-syllabled lines which are irregularly divided: When to thy God thou speak'st, O creature meane, Lift up pure hands, lay downe all foule desires:— The simplicity of these oppositions—God/creature meane, pure hands/foule desires—is part of a general pattern which sees prayer as involving cleanliness (as in the confessional), and then as concentration upon God:

145

Henry Burton, A Tryall of Private Devotions, or a Diall for the Houres of Prayer (1628); quoted in Introduction to John Cosin', A Collection of Private Devotions, ed. P. G. Stanwood and Daniel O'Connor (Oxford, 1967), p. xxxvii (all references are to this edn.). Calendars were a considerable occasion of controversy at this time: see Horton Davies, 221–52.


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Exclude the world from traffick with the mind. Lips neere to God, and ranging heart within, Is but vain babling The idea of the ranging heart was known to Shakespeare and to Donne, and in this Cosin was following an established tradition. A similar need for concentration, expressed again in a traditional form, is found in the little poem placed before the Confession in the ‘Preparative Prayers To all the Houres that follow’: God God God God God

be be be be be

in my head & understanding. in my eyes and in my seeing. in my mouth & in my speaking. in my heart & in my thinking. at my end and my departing.

This pre-Reformation prayer, which is probably French in origin, had appeared in other devotional primers (for instance in 1514 and 1538146). It has become generally used as a hymn or anthem text, probably because of its obvious differences from prose, with strong departures from normal speech. The most obvious of these are the floating signifier, ‘God’, which is never qualified, and the recurrent line patterns, which allow for only two variations, in the fifth syllable and the ninth (apart from minor shifts such as ‘at’ in the last line). The rhetoric is plain: the lines begin with an anaphora, and end with a feminine rhyme. In this text, the parts of the body (head, eyes, mouth) are used metonymically to indicate what is then given literally (understanding, seeing, speaking). The fourth line is unusual, because it links the heart with thinking; nevertheless, it continues the metonymic pattern. What is striking about the final line is the very effective transition from metonymy to metaphor: ‘my end’ means death, and ‘departing’ means the leaving of this life on the journey to the next. Placed at the end of a string of figures, it heightens the awareness of death by treating it as something that is not to be spoken of literally or even metonymically. It becomes mysterious, and quite different from the other elements in the text: they are all to do with the physical body, with life, with the senses, while the last line is concerned with the deprivation of sense, the loss of life, the ‘departing’ to a destination which is carefully unspecified. The first ‘hour’ is Mattins, containing a hymn after the Venite. This is a translation of the eighth-century Latin hymn, ‘Jam lucis orto Sidere’: Now that the Day-star doth arise, Beg we of God with humble cries

146

Cosin, Private Devotions, 335.

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Hurtfull things to keep away, While we duly spend the day. The elaborate syntax here gives a certain formality to the lines, and throughout Cosin's rhetoric and syntax are curiously fastidious. His language is distinctly prayer-bookish. His hymns begin with a powerful statement, and then expand into subordinate clauses which support and develop the original theme. This is the construction of Cosin's best-known hymn, his translation of the Veni Creator which has come to be used universally at Pentecost: Come Holy Ghost; our soules inspire, And lighten with celestiall fire. Thou the anointing Spirit art, Who dost thy seven-fold gifts impart: Thy blessed unction from above Is comfort, life, and fire of love; Enable with perpetuall light The dulnesse of our blinded sight. Anoint and cheere our soyled face— This hymn is found in the ‘Prayers for the Third Houre’, known as the Golden Hour or the Holy Hour: it is placed there most appropriately, because the descent of the Holy Ghost at Pentecost was traditionally thought to have been at the third hour. The hymn has its share of coded signifiers (‘thy seven-fold gifts’), but Cosin had already provided the necessary information in the prefatory matter to his book. This enables him to be allusive, metaphorical, and symbolic. One of the reasons why this hymn has continued to survive as a hymn for Whit-Sunday may be that it puts the reader in touch with an ancient tradition of belief and symbol, and explores the multiple resonances of two ancient ideas—the spirit as enlightening, and the spirit as anointing. Cosin combines spiritual understanding and liturgical practice: the Holy Ghost is to ‘lighten’ (both to enlighten and to set afire) and it is to ‘anoint’. It is the ‘anointing Spirit’, whose ‘unction’ (both the action of anointing with oil, and the spiritual influence) is three-fold: comfort, life, and fire of love. Cosin has taken the traditional symbolism of the liturgy and explored its significance. The ‘light’ leads in two directions: towards love—of which it is the fire—and towards true sight, the recovery from dull blindness. Its function is also to cleanse and cheer: Anoint and cheere our soyled face With the abundance of thy grace. The Holy Spirit's task is to wipe away the dirt, but it also ‘cheers’ the face, giving it a look of happiness and health. Cosin's hymns, and the presentation of the liturgy in his book, suggest that he loved cleanliness and order,


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and the presentation of sinful human life as a ‘soyled face’ is characteristic of his use of a metaphor which itself has liturgical implications, and is connected with his attempts to beautify and order worship. From this principal metaphor, the hymn then goes on to include subordinate prayers for peace (one of the twelve fruits of the Holy Ghost) and then concludes with an affirmation of the place of the Holy Ghost in the Trinitarian scheme of things: Teach us to know the Father, Sonne, And Thee of Both to be but One. That through the Ages all along This may be our endlesse Song. Praise to thy eternall merit, Father, Sonne, and Holy Spirit. The special quality of the Holy Ghost is emphasized by the unusual rhyme merit/Spirit: this is the final unexpected twist to a rhyme scheme that throughout has held the lines in a stiff and formal interaction with one another. The lines are of eight syllables throughout, but metrically they are flexible and irregular: the rhyme scheme introduces an element of formal patterning which counters this, making a hymn that is both wide-ranging (in metrical shape) and strictly organized (in rhyme). The final rhyme in two syllables breaks the pattern, and in doing so emphasizes both the Spirit and its merit. The Prayers for the Sixth Hour, or noon, contain a two-verse hymn in ten-syllabled lines, divided 4/6, adapted by Cosin from Ben Jonson's ‘A Hymne to God the Father’: Who more can crave than God for me hath done? To free a slave that gave his onely Sonne. By placing his version of Jonson's poem at the centre of the day, Cosin emphasizes the central truths of the Redemption. The second verse also contains his central expression of the practice of singing hymns, expressed in the rhetorical play of ‘singing say/and saying sing’: . . . Once was I dead, But now I'le raise againe my drooping head. And singing say, and saying sing for ever, Blest be my Lord that did my soule deliver. The Vespers hymn in the Private Devotions is Cosin's translation of ‘Salvator mundi Domine’, a Compline hymn in the Sarum Breviary. It

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sums up much of what has been expressed in the earlier hymns, with its images of gaining mercy, pardon for sin, and its prayer to be kept from ‘being soyld with sinful staine’. In addition, Cosin makes use of the third collect at Evening Prayer, ‘Lighten our darkness. . . ’: Great Ruler of the Day and Night, On our darknesse cast thy Light:— The stanza-form here is a five-line one, rhyming AABBB, handled with a stately regularity: And as thy Mercy wipes away What we have done amisse to day: So now the night returnes againe, Our Bodies & our Souls refraine, From being soyld with sinful staine. Cosin's image of sin as dirty and staining is another example of his passion for order and cleanliness. This feature of his character is found in his meticulous liturgical work, in his use of the liturgical calendar, and in his fascination with numbers (‘The Third, the Sixth, and the Ninth Houres, they divide the day into even spaces of time . . . And how can we doe lesse than THREE times in the day at least . . . fall downe and worship the Blessed TRINITY, Father, Sonne, and Holy Ghost?’).147 It is also responsible for his work as Bishop of Durham after the Restoration, when he restored the cathedral after the depredations of the Commonwealth years. And yet he succeeds as being more than just a numbers man: through the obsessional formality of the Private Devotions, there is a touching awareness of human frailty.148

Samuel Crossman Samuel Crossman was a generation younger than Cosin, and escaped the problems of the Civil War (during which Cosin was in exile in Paris). He was ordained in 1660, and was one of the clergy ejected from their benefices by the Act of Uniformity of 1662 (he later conformed, and became Dean of Bristol). His book, The Young Man's Meditation, or Some few Sacred Poems

147

Cosin, Private Devotions, 121–2.

148

It is curious and delightful to read of him at the Savoy Conference in 1661 under the sharp but fair eye of Richard Baxter: ‘Bishop Cosins was there constantly, and had a great deal of talk With so little Logick, Natural or Artificial, that I perceived no One much moved by any thing he said, But two Vertues he shewed (though none took him for a Magician): One was, that he was excellently well versed in Canons, Councils, and Fathers, which he Remembered, when by citing of any Passages we tried him. The other was, that as he was of a Rustick Wit and Carriage, so he would endure more freedom of our Discourse with him, and was more affable and familiar than the rest’ (Reliquiae Baxterianae, ed. Matthew Sylvester (London, 1696), i. 363).


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upon Select Subjects, and Scriptures, was published in 1664. In tone and temper it reflects Crossman's adherence to the Puritan cause within the Church of England, and it has affinities with Baxter's Poetical Fragments of 1681, most notably in its use of George Herbert's work as example and inspiration. On the title-page, Crossman quotes the lines from ‘The Church-porche’: A Verse may finde him, who a Sermon flies, And turn delight into a Sacrifice and Crossman has something of Herbert's ability to concentrate upon the Passion and death of Christ, and to produce a poetry from it that is both narrative and reflective. His best-known hymn, ‘My song is love unknown’, is prefaced by the text ‘God forbid that I should glory, save in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ’. It looks back to Herbert's ‘The Sacrifice’, and forward to Watts's ‘When I survey the wondrous cross’, which originates in the same text (Galatians 6: 14). It is written in the metre of the 148th Psalm in the ‘Old Version’; and just as John Pullain's psalm began with a rhetorical flourish ‘Give laud unto the Lord’, so Crossman begins with a play upon words, more flamboyantly and extensively than Pullain: My song is love unknown; My Saviour's love to me; Love to the loveless shown That they might lovely be. The crucial process of transformation is enacted through the suffixes: from ‘love-less’ to ‘love-ly’ through the action of love. Love itself needs no suffix, because it is itself, and nothing else: it is a love ‘unknown’, and in that word ‘unknown’ are found several meanings—unknown because unimaginable, or because it is ignored, or simply because it is a love which is known to God but unknown to men. Crossman uses words that raise such questions, or which are used in unusual ways, as he does in verses 2 and 3: But men made strange, and none The longed-for Christ would know— Then ‘Crucify!’ Is all their breath— The reader or singer recognizes these for what they are, compressed ways of telling a well-known story—‘The longedfor Christ’ is an unexpected way of compressing features of the gospel, and ‘all their breath’ is a vivid way of suggesting that the word ‘Crucify’ is breathed out; to ‘make strange’ is to make difficulties, to hold back. The hymn is a narrative with commentary, a story of love on one side and brutality on the other, told with swift compression and given a gloss of indignation, amazement, and even irony.

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Thus verse 1, after the initial statement of love transforming the loveless, turns into a questioning mode which is full of wonder and surprise—as though the question mark could also be an exclamation mark: O who am I That for my sake, My Lord should take Frail flesh, and die? ‘O who am I?’ is a marvellous question, piercing and direct: it is an existential enquiry, parallel to the questions at the centre of great tragedy—Lear's ‘Who is it that can tell me who I am?’ and Oedipus's peremptory ‘I will know who I am’. Here it can stand on its own, and yet it is also given a specifically religious turn by the next three lines, ending with ‘die’ (which turns the mind back to the ‘I’ of the rhyme). The word ‘die’ is given a penetrating force by its placing at the end of the sentence, as the concluding phrase, and concluding step, of the action: it is the final piece of amazement for the reader, too: not only that God should take ‘frail flesh’, but also that he should die. Crossman uses the familiarity of the Palm Sunday and Good Friday events to produce a verse which sharpens the contrast between the two days: from the ‘sweet praises’ and ‘Hosannas to their King’, the verse changes rhythm, tempo and metre quite suddenly: Then ‘Crucify!’ Is all their breath— The next verse contains something most unexpected in a hymn (though found abundantly in Herbert's ‘The Sacrifice’), an exercise in an ironic mode. The poet adopts the position of the ingenu, the naïve enquirer: Why, what hath my Lord done? What makes this rage and spite? His answer turns the naïvety into powerful irony: He made the lame to run, He gave the blind their sight. Sweet injuries! The oxymoron wonderfully captures the moral confusion; and again the irony is found in ‘needs will have’: They rise, and needs will have My dear Lord made away; A murderer they save The Prince of Life they slay. The events are astonishing, and Crossman uses his powerful rhetoric to bring out their perversity with all the hindsight of a spiritual and theological


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interpretation. So they ‘needs will have’, they insist on having Jesus done away with (‘made away’): they save on the one hand, and slay on the other. It is made more morally abhorrent by the reminders of Jesus's life (making the lame run, giving the blind sight), and by the observation of his heroism: ‘Yet cheerful he | To suffering goes’. The narrative closes with the entombment, seen as the final resting-place of the Lord who had no earthly home, except in the human heart. Again, Crossman comments with a question which might equally be an exclamation: What may I say? Heaven was his home; But mine the tomb Wherein he lay. This is narrative with commentary again, though the commentary is open-ended, because it is not easy to know whether the tomb is a resting-place for the Saviour, or whether the singer, as a human being, is meant to feel partially responsible for the death of Christ, and hence his tomb. It is likely that both meanings exist together, as the narrative is concluded: the spectator/reader is also the beneficiary/guilty. The final verse is an invitation to ‘stay and sing’, to go back over the narrative (which has ended in verse 6) as the poet intends to do. ‘Here might I stay and sing’ must mean ‘Here I might well stay and sing’, rather than ‘Here might I stay [if I were not busy on other things]’. The possibility of the second reading, however, is a reminder of the claim of this story on the attention. There is ‘No story so divine’ (no other narrative in which the protagonists are so divine, and no other in which the meaning is so spiritually important, and the meaning of the action so holy). But it is a story that is divine, a human narrative as well as a theological wonder: its dual nature is brought out sharply in the contrast: Never was love, dear King, Never was grief like thine! The anaphora brings out the double-sided nature of the action, the love and grief: and the second line, which gives an answer to Herbert's ‘The Sacrifice’, is a resounding assent: ‘Never was grief like thine!’ The hymn is remarkable, not only for its use of the metre and its rhetorical techniques, but also for its ability to accommodate many voices and attend to the many ironies which occur when the Son of God is crucified. The singer/ speaker has two voices, one a narrative voice which addresses a listener—‘My song is love unknown’—the other a reflexive voice, that turns inwards—‘O who am I?’ Voices being what they are, the two modes interact with each other: sometimes the narrative voice seems to

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be telling itself what happened, and the reflexive voice is there to be overheard. Both voices, and the others such as the ironic voice, are there to probe, question, even to give up the struggle to express the emotion in a text—‘What may I say?’ Throughout the hymn such centrifugal forces, the many voices and moods, are held together by a combination of narrative and reflection, and by the rhetorical expression of divine action and human response.

John Mason Like Crossman, John Mason is known principally as the author of one hymn. ‘How shall I sing that Majestie’ was the first hymn in his Spiritual Songs, or, Songs of Praise to Almighty God Upon several Occasions. Together with The Song of Songs, Which is Solomons . . . of 1683. The crucial word in this title is ‘Praise’, for Mason's hymns are filled with joy and praise: What shall I render to my God, For all his Gifts to me? Sing Heav'n, and Earth, rejoyce and praise His Glorious Majestie. Bright Cherubims, swift Seraphims Praise Him with all your might. Praise, praise Him all ye Hosts of Heav'n, Praise Him ye saints in Light. (‘A General Song of Praise to Almighty God’, II) Mason was influenced by the Cambridge Platonists, whose mystical tendencies led them to emphasize the glory of God and his majesty; Mason was squarely in their tradition of mystical doctrine and lyrical eloquence in his poetry.149 In his later years his enthusiasm turned into eccentricity, and he attracted a considerable number of peculiar followers to his church in Water-Stratford by preaching the imminent arrival of Jesus in the village. None of this appears in his Spiritual Songs: while the poems show evidence of unusual imagery and enthusiasm, they also demonstrate the Platonists' use of reason in its highest form, in which the soul of man is ‘the candle of the Lord’.150 The metre is a conventional, and rather dull, Double Common Metre, which Mason uses uniformly in his work (with occasional half-verses of four lines): but the language is remarkable. I see blind People with mine Eyes, To Hospitals I walk,

149

See Frederick J. Powicke, The Cambridge Platonists (London, 1926), 23.

150

The phrase is from Vivian de Sola Pinto, Peter Sterry, Platonist and Puritan (Cambridge, 1934), 18, quoting Proverbs 20.27.


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I hear of them that cannot hear, And of the Dumb I talk. Lord, what am I that thou should'st shew Such Favour unto me? My Bones and Senses all must say, Lord, who is like to Thee? Such constant awareness of preservation and blessing is found in ‘A Song of Praise for Family Prosperity’: Let me be ever good to Thine, Who art so good to me! Let thine be mine and mine be thine, And they twice mine shall be;— The idea and its expression are taken from Herbert's ‘Clasping of hands’; and if Crossman is a link between Herbert and Watts, in his dramatic rendering of the crucifixion and its attendant ironies, Mason stands between Herbert and Charles Wesley, particularly in his use of metaphor, his ardour, and his insistence on personal and practical religion. Herbert is the source of ‘A Song of Praise for the Lord's Day’: Blest day of God, most Calm, most bright; The first and best of days.— and in ‘A Song of Praise for Christ’, Mason's variation on ‘Come, my Way, my Truth, my Life’ begins with Herbert but then looks forward to John Newton in verse 2 and to Charles Wesley in verse 3: Christ is the Way, the Truth and Life, The Way to God and Glory. Life to the Dead, the Truth of Types, The Truth of Ancient Story. Christ is a Prophet, Priest and King: A Prophet full of Light, A Priest that stands 'twixt God and Man. A King that Rules with Might. My Christ, He is the Lord of Lords, He is the King of Kings. He is the Sun of Righteousness With Healing in his Wings. Like a seventeenth-century preacher, Mason presses meaning from metaphors and symbols, and creates unusual typologies. ‘How shall I sing that Majestie’, for example, contains an astonishing discussion of mercy in an exposition of the crossing of the Red Sea. That crossing was a traditional example of God's providence, but not in this way:

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Mercy, that shining Attribute, The Sinners hope and Plea! Huge Hosts of sins in their Pursuit Are drown'd in thy Red-Sea. The use of Exodus continues in the final verse, which anticipates Watts's ‘There is a land of pure delight’: Since none can see thy Face and live, For me to die is best. Through Jordan's streams who would not dive To Land at Canaan's Rest? The introduction of diving is typical of Mason's fearless and exuberant use of language. He uses it to celebrate two things: the first is the person of Jesus, his Incarnation, Life, Sufferings, and Death, and the relationship of these things to human unworthiness and sin; the second is the presence of God, the illimitable and unimaginable, the God of light and wonder before whom all normal human language breaks down: Creation all our Wit Transcends; Redemption rises higher. (‘How shall I sing that Majestie’) The result is the question which opens the hymn (and the book)—‘How shall I sing. . . ?’. It is a question which appears to be rhetorical, and is so, but which also is not, for it has a multiple significance: ‘How shall I sing of that which is unsingable?’ and ‘How shall I sing?’ The verse ends with another question: Ten thousand times ten thousand sound Thy praise; but who am I? Again the question seems simple, or rhetorical, but is profound, probing, and indeterminate. It means ‘Who am I that I should presume (to sound thy praise)?’; but it also means, in the great tradition of tragic drama, ‘Who am I?’—to which the answer is given in the following stanza: I am the tracer of footsteps, the hearer of a sound, the one on whom the beam may shine, the one who might begin heaven with an alleluia. Throughout, the singer is very properly in the position of one who is seeking rather than finding, praying for a beam of light but conscious that others round the throne can see and hear God while he cannot. In consequence he prays for fire and light, the qualities of the Holy Spirit, although he knows that even then he will be dark, cold, and poor: Enlighten with faith's light my heart, Inflame it with love's fire; Then shall I sing and bear a part With that celestial choir.


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I shall, I fear, be dark and cold, With all my fire and light; Yet when Thou dost accept their gold, Lord, treasure up my mite. The adaptation of the story of the widow's mite (from Mark 12: 42) is a delicate and skilful counterweight to the prevailing sense of unworthiness: it makes the spiritual poverty an acceptable part of the religious tradition. But, as the fourth verse makes clear, God ‘keeps’ all beings: he preserves them, in a way which both emphasizes his providential care and his greatness: How great a being, Lord, is Thine, Which doth all beings keep! Thy knowledge is the only line To sound so vast a deep. Mason's skill is to present a God who is simultaneously loving and remote, caring and unknowable. The image of the fathom-line is a vivid way of saying that only God can know God, that all human knowledge breaks down at this point. All the normal definitions, borders, and edges of things disappear: Thou art a sea without a shore, A sun without a sphere; Thy time is now and evermore, Thy place is everywhere. Human attempts to think of God in such images are bound to fail, just as God breaks all the laws of time and space. The metre, that of the metrical psalms, gives little assistance to the thought, but it is interesting to see how Mason uses it. He rarely uses it to emphasize parallelisms: he is more inclined to work in units of four lines, supplementing and amplifying as he goes along. As he does so he draws upon biblical imagery, but also on human experience, and his work often has a particular curiosity and luminosity which comes from the unexpected use of images; he is strikingly able to see matters from an original viewpoint, and unusually good at portraying the impossible, while maintaining that it is impossible to find words to describe it. His Christian Platonism may be responsible for Mason's striking attempts to describe the reality of heaven and contrast it with the unreality of the fallen world.

Thomas Ken Thomas Ken wrote his Morning, Evening, and Midnight Hymns when he was a Fellow of Winchester College, sometime after 1666. It is not quite

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clear when: Ken's A Manual of Prayers For the Use of the Scholars of Winchester College, published in 1674, exhorted its readers to ‘be sure to sing the Morning and Evening Hymn in your chamber devoutly’,151 but this may refer to the Latin hymns, ‘Jam lucis orto Sidere’ and ‘Te lucis ante terminum’, which were used at Winchester. It may, however, indicate that Ken had already written his hymns and published them on separate sheets: they were certainly published in an appendix to A Manual of Prayers in 1695. A Manual of Prayers is addressed to an imaginary boy, who is named as Philotheus, God-lover, and who is to be encouraged in ‘an early Piety’.152 Thus in the morning, he is exhorted to ‘keep all worldly thoughts out of your mind, till you have presented the first fruits of the day to God. . . ’, and at night he is reminded of the need to make peace with God: ‘Consider, good Phil how many that have gone to Bed Well over night, have been found dead the next Morning. . . ’153 This may seem unnecessarily threatening, but Ken is concerned to make sure that schoolboys are made aware of the necessary practices of religion and of the need for piety. He sees Winchester College as a place where learning and godliness are combined, and where schoolboys are ‘in a manner brought up in a perpetuity of Prayer’.154 Yet Ken is touchingly aware that it is impossible for a schoolboy to live up to such exalted ideas: Be not then afflicted, good Phil. if you cannot come up exactly to the Rules here given you. Believe me, it was never imagined you would; it was only hoped you would endeavour it;—155 It is in the context of this prayer-book for children, with its high-minded idealism and its tolerant understanding, that the Morning, Evening, and Midnight hymns can be fully appreciated. They are the first children's hymns; they celebrate a tradition of regular worship and service, of habitual prayer, and of devotional piety, and at the same time they are aware of human weakness and failure. These characteristics suggest that Ken's work has something in common with Herbert's (Ken would have had a particular interest in Herbert because his sister married Izaak Walton, Herbert's biographer). Indeed, Ken has been described as ‘a kind of Herbert redivivus’,156 and the influence may be traced in the hymns as well as in the life. His hymns are Herbert for children. The hymns are measured in their octosyllabic couplets, suggesting the control of feeling, and perhaps the regularity of prayer; the lines are to fix

151

A Manual of Prayers For the Use of the Scholars of Winchester College, And all other Devout Christians (1705), 29.

152

From the Preface to A Manual of Prayers, unpaginated.

153

A Manual of Prayers, 26.

154

Ibid. 22.

155

Ibid. 118.

156

E. H. Plumptre, The Life of Thomas Ken (London, 1889), i. 21.


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themselves in the child's mind through their plainness, and they enact what they preach in their steady couplet beat: Awake, my soul, and with the sun Thy daily stage of duty run; Shake off dull sloth, and early rise To pay thy morning sacrifice.157 Both parts of this verse begin with similar-sounding imperatives, designed to discourage laziness—‘Awake . . . Shake off ’, the second introducing a parallelism which develops the thought of the first two lines. The rhymes are clear and firm, and the alliteration is obvious: within this organized structure the verse offers delicate patterns of metaphor—running a stage on the journey of life, shaking off sloth, paying the sacrifice. Ken never treats the boy with anything less than dignity and respect: As all thy Converse be sincere, Thy Conscience as the Noon-day clear; Think how All-seeing God thy ways, And all thy secret Thoughts surveys. The behaviour of the child is linked with the natural processes of nature throughout: he awakes with the sun, his conscience is to be clear as the noonday, and subsequently he prays: Lord, I my vows to Thee renew Scatter my sins as Morning dew The images are all of sunshine, clear light, dew; and the soul is to be a reflection of the heavenly light: Influenc'd by the Light divine, Let thy own Light in good Works shine: The soul partakes of the great rhythms of day, and prepares itself for another day, the ‘great Day’; part of that preparation is the endless cycle of night and day, sleeping and waking: Glory to Thee who safe hast kept, And hast refresh't me whilst I slept. And God, who keeps and refreshes during the night, is now invited to do more during the day: Direct, control, suggest this day, All I design, or do, or say; That all my Powers, with all their might, In thy sole Glory may unite.

157

There are many texts of the three hymns. I have used the 1695 texts, as printed in John Julian, Dictionary of Hymnology (London, 1892), 618–21.

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The confluence is managed in answering threes: God directing, controlling, suggesting, the soul designing, doing, saying; then, changing the order (so that it is God–child–child–God) the answering is done by the opposites—calling to each other through the similarities in diction—‘all my Powers/thy sole Glory’. The all of various human powers points to one end, which is God, and the unity of all things in Him is an idea which is carried on from this verse to the final one, where all things on earth and in heaven are joined: Praise Praise Praise Praise

God, from whom all Blessings flow, him all creatures here below, him above y'Angelick Host. Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

This doxology verse is so well-known that its artistry usually escapes attention:158 the anaphora of ‘Praise’ is obvious, but it is also interesting to see how lines 1 and 4 are used to define God, and between them lines 2 and 3 are used to exhort the creatures on earth and the angels in heaven to join together in praise. The final description of God as Holy Trinity fits the eight-syllable line exactly, in an expression of the unity which Ken has been searching for, all things coming together in a perfect line at the end of the hymn. Before it are morning, noon, the whole day; sun, clear air, dew; sins to be scattered, hopes to be cherished, Heaven to be reflected. All these things end, as they begin, in God. The Evening Hymn also begins with God's glory, and the couplet form is again crucial in establishing the rhythm, which is also the rhythm of night and day, waking and sleeping: Glory to thee my God, this night, For all the Blessings of the Light; The rhyme contains the central opposition—night/Light; Ken works in such contrasts, seen as part of the natural process of things, and reflected internally, in the contrast between sin and peace:

158

There is a fine paragraph on this verse in the introductory essay to James Montgomery's The Christian Psalmist (Glasgow, 1825), p. xviii. Montgomery provides a good example of close reading, teasing out the full meaning and describing the verse as ‘a Masterpiece at once of amplification and compression:—amplification, on the burthen, “Praise God”, repeated in each line;—compression, by exhibiting God as the object of praise in every view in which we can imagine praise due to Him:—praise, for all his blessings, yea, for “all blessings”, none coming from any other source,—praise, by every creature, specifically invoked, “here below”, and in heaven “above”,—praise, to Him in each of the characters wherein He has revealed Himself in his word—“Father, Son, and Holy Ghost”. Yet this comprehensive verse is sufficiently simple that by it “out of the mouths of babes and sucklings praise might be perfected”; and it appears so easy, that one is tempted to think hundreds of the sort might be made without trouble. The reader has only to try, and he will quickly be undeceived, though the longer he tries the more difficult he will find the task to be.’


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Forgive me, Lord, for thy dear Son, The ill that I this day have done, That with the world, my self, and Thee, I, ere I sleep, at peace may be. The various suspensions and inversions are woven round the central opposition of day-sin/sleep-peace; the pattern is so strong that it then provokes the contemplation of a further opposition, between life and death: Teach me to live, that I may dread The Grave as little as my Bed; Teach me to die, that so I may Triumphing rise at the last day. The contrast between the grave and the homely action of getting into bed is a startling coalescence of the two worlds of the poem—that of the boy, getting up and (now) going to bed, and that of the immortal soul.159 The soul rests not in bed, but on God: O may my Soul on thee repose, And with sweet sleep mine Eye-lids close; Sleep that may me more vig'rous make, To serve my God when I awake. The first line is like the end of Herbert's ‘Even-song’—‘And in this love, more than in bed, I rest’—but the second line returns to the physical world of closing eyes, and then to the rhythm of renewal, of sleeping and waking, of closing eyelids and vigorous energy. Body and soul are engaged here in a dance of sense and spirit, sometimes separating and sometimes joining hands, so that the discourse is about sleep and about death, of resting in God but also about waking to a neo-Platonic freedom from matter: The faster sleep the sense does bind, The more unfetter'd is the mind; O may my Soul from matter free, Thy unvail'd Goodness waking see! Such transitions between the physical and spiritual worlds of the hymn are not always effected with complete success, but some of the verses explore the significance of the sleeping and waking contrast with considerable ingenuity. Ken takes the verse from Psalm 4: 8: ‘I will both lay me down in peace, and sleep: for thou, Lord, only makest me dwell in safety’, and succeeds in applying it to the situation of a boy at school but also to the permanent condition of the soul.

159

There are strong similarities, first observed by James Montgomery in his Select Christian Authors (1827), between this verse and Sir Thomas Browne's poem in Religio Medici : ‘And as gently lay my head | On my grave, as now my bed’.

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The ‘New Version’ The sweet simplicity of Ken's couplets, his straightforwardness, was owing to the circumstances of his book, its use as a manual for scholars. But his mode of writing was also affected by the changes taking place in the English language, and their effect upon religious discourse. It has been often observed that the third quarter of the seventeenth century witnessed a decided change in written English: the difference between the prose of Dryden and that of Donne is remarkable. One place where this is described is in Thomas Sprat's History of the Royal Society of London, published in 1667: the society, which had been given the name ‘Royal’ in 1662, was concerned not only with new discoveries in science, but also with the language in which those discoveries were reported, with what Sprat called ‘their Discourse’. The Royal Society set up a committee for improving the English language in 1664, and its members made ‘a constant Resolution’ to reject all the amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style: to return back to the primitive purity, and shortness, when men deliver'd so many things, almost in an equal number of words.160 The result of these changes was that when Nahum Tate and Nicholas Brady published A New Version of the Psalms of David, Fitted to the Tunes used in Churches in 1696, the conditions were right: their version succeeded where so many others had failed because it caught the moment, and answered exactly to the linguistic preconceptions of the time. Twenty-five years later, Sir Richard Blackmore had missed the tide. His version of 1721, dedicated to George I, ‘allowed and permitted to be used in all churches’, commended by a page-full of Archbishops and Bishops, failed to make an impression. Tate and Brady were therefore lucky, and their version continued to be the standard one for nearly two centuries. It was a Tate and Brady psalm that Hardy's villagers sang at the afternoon service at Mellstock, and it was the Tate and Brady version of the vengeful Psalm 109 that Henchard compelled the choir to sing in chapter 33 of The Mayor of Casterbridge. A verse from that psalm demonstrates the different character of the ‘New Version’: A swift destruction soon shall seize On his unhappy race; And the next age his hated name Shall utterly deface.

160

Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society (London, 1667), 113. See Richard Foster Jones, ‘Science and English Prose Style in the Third Quarter of the Seventeenth Century’, in Richard Foster Jones et al., The Seventeenth Century (Stanford, 1951), 75–110.


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The ‘Old Version’ read: Let his posterity be quite destroy'd and never breed: Their name out-blotted in the age that after shall succeed.161 The change from the passive mood to Tate and Brady's active mood, in which ‘destruction’ and ‘the next age’ are two subjects, alters the whole syntactical basis of the psalm, and thus its meaning: it suggests a different relationship between the agent, ‘A swift destruction’ and the sufferer. It is both simpler and coarser in feeling, more violent.162 Tate and Brady were very good at providing clear subjects and verbs: How blest is he, who ne'er consents By ill Advice to walk; Nor stands in Sinners ways, nor sits Where Men profanely talk. But makes the perfect Law of God His Business and Delight; Devoutly reads therein by Day, And meditates by Night. (Psalm 1) The last two lines give one line each to Day and Night instead of the Old Version's ‘himself both day and night’, while the ‘Business and Delight’ is one of the doublings of nouns that makes Tate and Brady's work so easy to assimilate: Thro all the changing Scenes of Life, In Trouble and in Joy, The Praises of my God shall still My Heart and Tongue employ. (Psalm 34) Here the second and fourth lines echo each other with pairs of nouns. At other points the parallelism of the Hebrew is shaped into lines: O magnifie the Lord with me, With me exalt his Name; and another celebrated example uses the two halves of the Common Metre stanza to balance simile and statement: As pants the Hart for cooling Streams When heated in the chace,

161

I have used the 1698 edn.

162

Emile Benveniste talks of ‘the attitude of the subject with relation to the process’: see ‘Active and Middle Voice in the Verb’, in Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, Fl., 1971).

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So longs my Soul, O God, for thee, And thy refreshing Grace. (Psalm 42) Tate and Brady were extremely skilful at matching the phrases to the lines, and in particular, in providing parallel echoes which satisfy the ear. In the next verse of Psalm 42, the phrase ‘my God, the living God’ in line 1 is echoed by the concluding ‘thy Face, | Thou Majesty Divine’: For thee, my God, the living God, My thirsty Soul doth pine; O when shall I behold thy Face, Thou Majesty Divine? (Psalm 42) The metrical skill of the ‘New Version’ allows a fluid movement through each verse. One technique is to have a strong pause at the end of line 2, and a broken line 3, with a run-on to the fourth line: How blest is he, who ne'er consents By ill Advice to walk; Nor stands in Sinners ways, nor sits Where Men profanely talk. (Psalm 1) So longs my soul, O God, for thee And thy refreshing Grace. (Psalm 42) Sometimes a stanza will be used to include an adverbial clause together with a main clause, often with the two balanced in an even relationship. This is found in ‘As pants the Hart’, and in many other places. It can be varied, to allow the main clause to come first and the adverbial second: O magnifie the Lord with me, With me exalt his Name; When in Distress to him I call'd He to my rescue came. (Psalm 34) Another technique is that of repetition and expansion: For thee, my God, the living God,— For when he spake the Word, 'twas made, 'Twas fixed at his Command. As Donald Davie has noted, Tate and Brady differ from Sternhold and Hopkins in their respect for ‘the integrity of the verse-line’; in the Old


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Version, Davie suggests, the notional or real pause at the end of the line is ‘a mere hindrance, a gulp’, whereas Tate and Brady use it with expressive intention and effect.163 Certainly they are skilful, mellifluous versifiers, but in the very act of simplifying and clarifying the ‘Old Version’ they naturally reveal the limitations of their renderings as well as the strengths. One of the limitations, the active-voice version of Psalm 109, makes the psalmist seem vengeful and violent; another, Psalm 112, makes him seem complacent, as a naïve exponent of religion and the rise of capitalism: That Man is blest who stands in aw Of God, and loves his sacred Law: His Seed on Earth shall be renown'd, And with successive Honours crown'd. His House, the Seat of Wealth, shall be An inexhausted Treasury; His Justice, free from all Decay, Shall Blessings to his Heirs convey— His lib'ral Favours he extends, To some he gives, to others lends: Yet what his Charity impairs He saves by Prudence in Affairs— Ill Tidings never can surprize His Heart that still on God relies: On Safety's Rock he sits and sees The Shipwreck of his Enemies— Tate and Brady's psalmody was in accord with an age of mercantile prosperity. Hogarth's industrious apprentice is here smugly anticipated. Similarly, their version of Psalm 100, written in the traditional Long Metre, contains the word ‘Convinc'd’, as though belief had been acquired through reason: With one consent let all the Earth To God their cheerful Voices raise, Glad Homage pay with awful Mirth, And sing before him Songs of praise. Convinc'd that he is God alone, From whom both we and all proceed— The choice of vocabulary, here and elsewhere, is significant: Tate and Brady were, in technique and style, as representative of the later seventeenth century as Sternhold and Hopkins had been of the sixteenth. And just as Sternhold and Hopkins were attacked by those who wished to

163

Donald Davie, ‘Psalmody as Translation’, Modern Language Review, 85 (1990), 817–28 (p. 819).

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replace them, so in their turn Tate and Brady became the object of criticism. Basil Woodd, who produced A New Metrical Version of the Psalms of David in 1821, noted that ‘the use of the New Version seems to be rapidly declining’: It has been frequently and justly objected to it, that it is frigid, often unconnected, inanimate, and defective in presenting that view of the Christian Church, and the sufferings and triumph of the Messiah, which adapts the Book of Psalms to Christian worship.164 However, the ‘New Version’ continued in common use in the Church of England until well into the nineteenth century, as Hardy's reference to it in ‘Afternoon Service in Mellstock’ indicates. At its worst, it leads to elegance: as Tate wrote in An Essay for the Promoting of Psalmody in 1710 (in part an answer to an attack by William Beveridge on the ‘New Version’), Is not an Elegant Manner of Translating these Divine Odes, as just a debt to the Psalmist, as to any Other Poet?165 At its best, in Psalms 34 and 42, and in the paraphrase, ‘While shepherds watch'd their flocks by night’, included in a supplement to their work in 1700, Tate and Brady produced versions that were singable, and also concerned with the changes and chances of the human condition. But in finding them defective in presenting ‘the sufferings and triumph of the Messiah’, Basil Woodd was no doubt thinking of that radical versifier of the psalms, Isaac Watts. Watts transformed the psalms by adapting them to Christian worship: the methods of Tate and Brady, on the other hand, led only to the polish and elegance of Addison's version of the twenty-third psalm; and it was this that the Puritans were afraid of. How the Puritans approached the writing of psalms and hymns is the subject of the next chapter.

164

Basil Woodd, ‘Preface’, A New Metrical Version of the Psalms of David (London, 1821). Woodd was indulging in the usual game of disparaging his predecessors in order to push his own work.

165

Christopher Spencer, Nahum Tate (New York, 1972), 132–3.

6 The Journey to Zion: Puritan Psalms and Hymns God's Altar needs not our pollishings. While Cosin was attempting to revive some pre-Reformation practices of prayer and spiritual discipline, the Puritans in England, and the followers of Knox in Scotland, continued to regard the metrical psalms as peculiarly valuable.166 However, the 1562 versions (and the 1564 Scottish psalm book) came in for much criticism, although it is likely (as I have suggested) that one of the reasons why Sternhold and Hopkins received such continued abuse throughout the seventeenth century, while continuing to remain acceptable to congregations, may have been the desire of the new versifiers to promote their own work. Wither's disparaging comments on Sternhold and Hopkins are found in The Scholler's Purgatory; in The Psalmes of David he distances himself from another common mode, the impassioned versification of the Penitential or Passionate psalms: he argued for ‘the grave, & simple Language of the Text’.167 Wither was referring here to a considerable number of English versions of selected psalms, usually the Penitential Psalms (Wyatt, Surrey, William Hunnis, Abraham Fraunce, Sir John Davies168) which had been published since the Reformation, together with the other complete versions (Matthew Parker, Sidney and the Countess of Pembroke, Henry Dod, Henry Ainsworth). Wither's not-very-subtle attempt to promote his own work is typical of the manœuvrings of metrical psalmists at this time: Francis Rous, for example, in his The Psalmes of David in English Meeter (1643) gave evidence of bad practice by Sternhold and Hopkins, in selected verses ‘that seem to

166

Millar Patrick, Four Centuries of Scottish Psalmody (London, 1949), 16.

167

George Wither, ‘Preface’, The Psalmes of David (printed in the Netherlands, 1632): ‘If you expect such elegant-seeming Paraphrases, as are composed by those, who selecting early and Passionate Psalmes, have trimmed them up with Rhetoricall Illustrations, (sutable to their fancies, & the changeable garb of Affected Language) I shall deceave your expectation: For, I have purposely avoyded those Descants, . . .’.

168

For a list of these psalms and psalm-writers, see John Julian, Dictionary of Hymnology (London, 1892) 926–7.

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PURITAN PSALMS AND HYMNS

call aloud for amendment’. Acknowledging that the tunes had become familiar, he undertook to alter the words: the harder Tunes of divers Psalmes by custome or skill are easie and delightfull . . . These Psalmes are now set forth corrected (whereof they had great need).169 Rous was handily placed to advance his book: he was a member of Cromwell's Council of State, and Speaker of the Barebones Parliament. His attempts to have his book adopted as the standard one were held up by the Westminster Assembly, which appointed a committee to revise the work (July 1647); in Scotland the same process led to the Scottish Psalter of 1650, which continued to print some of the familiar Geneva psalms, such as William Kethe's version of Psalm 100, and William Whittingham's Psalm 124.170 In England Rous's version was promoted by the House of Commons, which intended it to be the new standard psalter; but the House of Lords preferred the version by William Barton, a minister in the Puritan city of Leicester. Barton was clearly unscrupulous, as his book makes plain. Even in an age of indiscriminate psalm-phrase borrowing without acknowledgment, this stanza of his Psalm 23 is disgracefully close to Herbert's: He leads me to the tender grasse, where I both feed and rest; Then to the streams that gently passe, in both I have the best. But the most curious example of such opportunistic writing, designed to appeal to the Puritans in Parliament, was represented by Barton's Old Testament reading of recent history. In the 1645 edition, at the end of the Psalms, he printed ‘certain Hymns, composed out of Scripture, to celebrate some more speciall and publike occasions’, which include contemporary events, such as victory in the Civil War. His third hymn, published in the same year as the decisive battle, ‘Celebrates Nazeby, and other great Victories of the Church’. Like Cromwell's troopers, Barton saw battle in Old Testament terms, with the Parliamentary army as the Israelites. He quotes from the chapter which had been used by Wither (Judges 5) and the parallels between the Old Testament and the Civil War are brought out by using brackets to give alternative possibilities:

that hath avenged thee:

169

Francis Rous, ‘Preface’, The Psalmes of David in English Meeter (London, 1643), unpaginated.

170

See Patrick, Four Centuries of Scottish Psalmody.


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When as the people went to fight, Offring themselves so free. Ye kings give ear, ye Princes hear, I, even I will sing: And sweetly raise my voice in praise,

This is clearly a revolutionary text, reminding the earthly princes of the power of God and also of the readiness of the people to fight. The reading of contemporary history in Old Testament terms is formidable in its sense of righteousness: All they that are delivered,

The righteous acts of God the Lord, they shall rehearse with joyes—

Come lead them all along.171 It is in the context of this frenetic activity that Milton's metrical psalmody should be seen, especially his versions of Psalms 80–8, written in Common Metre in 1648. Milton had, much earlier, produced a pair of metrical versions as a schoolboy of fifteen:172 Let us with a gladsom mind Praise the Lord, for he is kind, For his mercies ay endure Ever faithfull, ever sure. The four lines balance beautifully: the first and third without a caesura, the second and fourth having a heavy pause. The ‘For . . . for’ is echoed by the 171

Barton later went on to write voluminously, producing four hundred hymns in Four Centuries of Select Hymns (1668), and no less than six hundred in Six Centuries of Select Hymns and Spiritual Songs (4th edn., 1688).

172

Milton's father, a musician, was keenly interested in metrical psalmody, and contributed harmonizations and new settings of old tunes to Thomas Ravenscroft's The Whole Booke of Psalmes in 1621. See William Riley Parker, Milton: A Biography (Oxford, 1968), 18.

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‘Ever . . . ever’, leading from ‘faithfull’ to the resting-place on ‘sure’. We may compare this with the version which uses the 148th Psalm metre, with the refrain in the second part of the verse, 4.4.4.4: For certainly His mercies dure Both firm and sure Eternally. Milton's version is crisper, more rhythmically satisfying, the rhymes more prominent and effective, the caesuras perfectly placed. The word ‘gladsom’ in the first line signals an unusual use of vocabulary, which also helps to give the psalm-version its character. The second verse begins: Let us blaze his Name abroad, For of Gods he is the God; . . . here the word ‘blaze’, meaning to proclaim, is much stronger than the original ‘give thanks’. It is part of Milton's youthful exuberance in this poem: he really does have a ‘gladsom mind’, praising God not only in the celebration of the created world (the Golden-tressed Sun, the horned Moon, the spangled sisters) but also in the joy of language. He borrows from Shakespeare and Spenser, among others, but above all from Du Bartas's Devine Weekes and Workes, translated by Joshua Sylvester;173 there he found unusual and sonorous words such as ‘Erythrean’ (from the Greek ‘red’): The ruddy waves he cleft in twain Of the Erythrean main—, or the word ‘Amorrean’ (for Amorite): He foild bold Seon and his host, That rul'd the Amorrean coast.— Compound epithets expand ‘Og the king of Basan’ from the psalm into And large-limbed Og he did subdue, With all his over-hardy crew. Milton's version is a tour de force of linguistic energy and textual ingenuity, taking the psalm's description ‘And Og the giant large’ (in the metrical version) in order to develop and extend it (the size of Og's huge bed is the subject of Deuteronomy 3: 11). The psalm thus becomes a genuinely new version, among all the nearly identical texts of the Reformation psalms: it is a version which defamiliarizes, both in describing God's power over his enemies (Pharaoh, Seon, Og), and also in complementing this by emphasizing his generosity:

173

See The Poems of John Milton, ed. John Carey and Alastair Fowler (London, 1968), 7–10.


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All living creatures he doth feed, And with full hand supplies their need— Let us therefore warble forth His mighty Majesty and worth The word ‘warble’ (from Du Bartas) is a final example of the way in which the young Milton takes a psalm and breaks free from the conventional mode by importing words from elsewhere and by picking up the psalmist's allusions. His paraphrase is a bold and original treatment of a difficult psalm, with its continuous refrain. Milton's other psalm versions are very different. They were written much later, Psalms 80–8 in 1648 and Psalms 1–8 in 1653. The 1653 psalms are of great interest as a reflection of Milton's problems at the time, both personal and political, and as demonstrating his use of a variety of metres; but the 1648 versions of Psalms 80–8 are the ones which require treatment here, because they contain verses which have survived to be made into hymns. ‘The Lord will come and not be slow’ is a selection of verses from Psalms 82, 85, and 86; ‘How lovely are thy dwellings fair’ is from Psalm 84. The fact that these psalms were all written in Common Metre is another reason for seeing them as contributions to the development of the metrical psalms used in worship: some historians believe that they were composed for a specific purpose, perhaps an army prayer-meeting, or to be considered by a committee of the Scottish General Assembly.174 Because the Psalms were seen as the work of ‘holy David’ writing under divine inspiration, fidelity to the original text was of crucial importance. Sternhold and Hopkins said that they had ‘conferred with the Hebrew’, and other versions made similar claims. Milton, whose poetic instincts led him to add significantly to the original, showed his respect for the principle in an unusual and very explicit way, by italicizing the words which were not in the original, and by giving the Hebrew in his notes. He was attempting to reconcile three conflicting demands: the Common Metre stanza, his own imaginative and poetic art, and the original text. His freedom of manœuvre was therefore very limited, but he used that freedom with consummate skill. In the space available, he allowed his imagination some exercise: Truth from the earth like to a flowr Shall bud and blossom then, And Justice from her heavenly bowr Look down on mortal men. Coverdale's translation is ‘Truth shall flourish out of the earth: and righteousness hath looked down from heaven’; Milton amplifies this in order to

174

See William B. Hunter, Jr., ‘Milton Translates the Psalms’, Philological Quarterly, 40 (1961), 485–94; and Margaret Boddy, ‘Milton's Translations of Psalms 80–88’, Modern Philology, 64 (1966–7), 1–9.

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bring out more forcefully the double action—Truth from the earth. . . Justice from heaven. He keeps the metaphors of ‘flourish’ and ‘look down’, but he makes them more explicit, turning ‘flourish’ into a smile, and giving justice a bower to look down from. The first verse of this hymn, ‘The Lord will come, and not be slow’ has been made by altering the order of the couplets in Psalm 85: 13: Before him Righteousness shall go His Royal Harbinger, Then will he come, and not be slow, His footsteps cannot err. The obvious expansion is the extraordinary second line (line 4 in hymn versions) in which the vocabulary lifts the verse towards the chivalric: a harbinger is a forerunner, but a ‘Royal Harbinger’ suggests something of the medieval sense of one who goes before a king to prepare his lodging; and it could also be applied to Righteousness, giving it a royal quality. It is a brilliant addition to the psalm, emphasizing the royalty and magnificence of God, his stately progress. Placing ‘Truth from the earth’ after this verse (instead of two verses before, where it comes in Psalm 85) works well, because of the ‘then’ at the end of line 2, which suggests the double action of truth and justice as consequent upon the coming of the Lord. Also skilful, though not Miltonic, is the insertion at this point of the imperative from Psalm 82: 8: Rise, God, judge thou the earth in might, This wicked earth redress, For thou art he who shalt by right The nations all possess. At the centre of the psalm, this verse provides a complicating text: it expands the idea of truth and justice, but does so by associating them with a wicked (Milton's addition) earth. As the hymn now stands, the text becomes intriguingly indeterminate: the coming of the Lord is to be welcomed and feared. Yet it is also a prayer for God to transform the earth (‘redress’ means ‘put right’), and it looks forward also to the celebration of God at the end, the worker of wonders, the awe-inspiring one God: For great thou art, and wonders great By thy strong hand are done, Thou in thy everlasting seat Remainest God alone. The seat, like God, is everlasting, a judgement-seat and a throne: the words which Milton has added significantly gather up the poem's themes. ‘How lovely are thy dwellings fair’, Milton's other metrical psalm version which has survived (in Songs of Praise, for example) is more evidence of


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much skill and imagination in a small compass, particularly demonstrated in the way in which he smoothes out the bumpiness of the ‘Old Version’, which went: My soul doth long full sore to go into thy courts abroad: My heart and flesh cry out also for thee the living God. Milton is certainly more conscious of the music of the lines, and of the balance of the two-line units, placing ‘O Lord to see’ at the end of line 2, and following it with the lovely rhythm and cadence of ‘O living God, for thee’ in line 4: My soul doth long and almost die Thy Courts O Lord to see, My heart and flesh aloud do crie, O living God, for thee. Milton's musicality looks forward to the ‘New Version’: and to the metrical psalmists of the later seventeenth century harmony not only became more important than rhyme, but also a factor which permitted a deviation from the original when a more pleasing verse would result. ‘The ear’, said Richard Baxter, ‘desireth greater melody than strict versions will allow.’175 The one great exception to this process of gradual change towards harmony and musicality was the Bay Psalm Book, the New England version of the Psalms. The Pilgrim Fathers had taken Henry Ainsworth's version with them to Plymouth in 1620, but the Massachusetts settlers arrived in 1629–30 with Sternhold and Hopkins. Their dissatisfaction with it was not because of its poetics but because it seemed to them to be inaccurate: ‘they beheld in the Translation’, said Cotton Mather, ‘so many Detractions from, Additions to, and Variations of, not only the Text, but the very Sense of the Psalmist, that it was an Offence unto them’.176 The result was a text that demonstrates the Puritan preference for plain speech in an extreme form: the rhetoric of the ‘Old Version’ disappears, and compression and economy take its place: Th' foole in's heart saith ther's no God: they are corrupt, have done abominable-practises, that doth good there is none. (Psalm 14)

175

Julian, A Dictionary of Hymnology, 919.

176

Cotton Mather, Magnalia ; quoted in the introduction to the facsimile reprint of the Bay Psalm Book (New York, 1903), p. vi. See also Waldo S. Pratt, The Music of the Pilgrims (Boston, 1922).

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The spirit of this rendering is the same as that which led the Puritans, from the Reformation onwards, to attack poetry.177 The Preface to the Bay Psalm Book roughly dismisses criticism: ‘God's Altar needs not our pollishings.’178 One of the influences which led the moderate Puritans away from such an uncompromising plainness, and encouraged them to think that the writing of poetry might be something other than spiritually dangerous, was the example of George Herbert. Like the Anglican writers, the Baptists Keach and Bunyan both used the lines from ‘The Churchporche’—‘A verse may finde him, who a sermon flies’. In the ‘Proem’ of his War with the Devil (1673), however, it is significant that Benjamin Keach coarsens Herbert: A verse may catch a wandering Soul, that flies Profounder tracts, and by a blest surprize Convert Delight into a Sacrifice.— Herbert's lovely verb ‘finde’ has turned into the spiritually more aggressive ‘catch’; and, of course, Keach sees the sermon, the preaching of the word, as more ‘profound’ than poetry. Keach was a pioneer, whose work must now be briefly considered, as the first of four Puritan writers.

Benjamin Keach Benjamin Keach was a Baptist, who became a pastor of a church in his native Buckinghamshire at the age of eighteen in 1658. The Baptists were among the most radical of the seventeenth-century sects, and were subjected to considerable persecution after the Act of Uniformity. Keach was prosecuted in 1664 for publishing The Child's Instructor, a primer intended to teach the rudiments of Christianity and reading, but which also advocated adult baptism and criticized the Church of England; he was imprisoned, fined, and put in the pillory. Later, as a Particular Baptist minister in Southwark, Keach introduced hymn-singing into his services. He began by inserting a hymn after the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper, and in due course this custom was extended to allow a hymn every Sunday.179 In consequence, Keach has been called ‘a pioneer of congregational hymn singing’,180 and he produced a large hymn-book for congregational use, his Spiritual Melody of 1691. He continued to encourage the practice, even during times of increased

177

See ‘Introduction’, Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith (Oxford, 1904), pp. xiv ff.

178

See the Preface to the Bay Psalm Book : ‘If therefore the verses are not always so smooth and elegant as some may desire or expect; let them consider that God's Altar needs not our pollishings: Ex. 20, for we have respected rather a plaine translation, than to smooth our verses with the sweetnes of any paraphrase, and soe have attended Conscience rather than Elegance, fidelity rather than poetry . , . . ’.

179

Horton Davies, Worship and Theology in England from Andrewes to Baxter and Fox, 1603–1690 (Princeton, 1975), 510.

180

Hugh Martin, Benjamin Keach, Pioneer of Congregational Hymn Singing (London, 1961).


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persecution following the Test Acts of 1673 and 1678, when the sounds of church music could betray the presence of a Dissenters' meeting to the authorities, and ‘as their Lord went from the supper to the garden, and from thence to the cross, so they had often left the Lord's table to appear at the magistrate's bar, and from thence be dragged to prison’.181 Keach used hymn-singing as an aid to worship and for the exposition of scripture. In The Breach Repair'd in God's Worship (1691), he argued against those, most notably Isaac Marlow, who in A Discourse Concerning Singing (1690) had attacked the whole practice as a distraction from the simple directness of Puritan worship.182 Keach argued for singing on the authority of Holy Scripture, with much citing of texts, giving examples from David, Solomon, and elsewhere; but he also had clear views about the educational value of hymn-singing. Keach had a very strong sense of logical propriety, which served him well when it came to discussing metaphorical theology: he used hymns to expound scripture texts, to elucidate parables, and to deconstruct metaphors. He argued that in hymns, although the words were not the same, their resemblance to the Scripture made them perfectly acceptable; indeed, they could be used to ‘open’ texts. ‘Opening’ of texts was Keach's particular interest. In Tropologia, A Key to Open Scripture Metaphors (1681) he used his logical and dogged mind to disentangle the intricacies of metaphorical theology; and his huge Exposition of the Parables, and Express Similitudes of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ (1701) was devoted to ‘exposing’ the truths that are hidden.183 These processes of observation, opening, and application are to be found in Keach's hymns; in them he explores the implications of texts and metaphors with great thoroughness. In The Banquetting-House, or, A Feast of Fat Things (1692), hymn 50 expounds the text from Matthew 23: 37: ‘How often would I have gathered thy Children together, as a Hen gathereth her Chickens under her Wings’. Keach sees it as a text about the abundant mercy, or ‘bowels’, of God: Thy Bowels unto Sinners, Lord Is shewed by the Hen, Who in her care of all her young Doth far exceed some Men. The ‘Second Part’ expounds the text with dogged thoroughness: The Hen stands ready and prepar'd, Hov'ring her mournful wings,

181

Howard Malcolm, Preface to Benjamin Keach, Travels of True Godliness (Boston, 1831), 9.

182

For Isaac Marlow, see Davies, Worship . . . from Andrewes to Baxter and Fox, 274–5.

183

Keach's method was ‘to observe the scope and coherence’ of a parable; ‘Secondly, Open or explain all the terms and parts contained therein; Thirdly, Observe those points of doctrine that lie most clear in the words. Fourthly, apply the whole.’ (An Exposition of the Parables, London, 1701), 284 (1856 repr.).

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And never is she satisfy'd Till under them she brings: So thou dost spread thy Arms, O Lord— Keach's preface to The Banquetting-House indicated that he hoped to appeal to ‘three sorts of persons’: the first were such who like and approve of Books in Verse which treat of Divine Things, and would gladly have a little help in order to the understanding of Metaphorical Scripture. . .184 the second were children, because ‘children will soon get them by heart’, and ‘youth are generally inclin'd to Poetry’; and the third group were ‘godly Christians', who know ’tis their indispensible duty to sing Psalms and Hymns, &c. not only in their families, but in the publick Congregation. . .185 Keach's principal interests are found in this preface: his advocacy of public hymn-singing, his desire to instruct, and his obsessive curiosity about metaphorical theology.186 In Tropologia, Keach searches the Scriptures and shows how God as Father is compared to, among other things, a Portion, a Habitation, a Husbandman, a Builder, a Man of War, a Strong Tower, a Giant, a Lion, a Leopard, a Bear, and a Moth (the last three examples are taken from Hosea chapters 13 and 5). In each case Keach examines the relationship between the two things, the heavenly and earthly, realizing that any perception of the resemblance between them depends upon a readiness to provide a spiritual context or co-text: ‘God, by a gracious Condescension, conveying the knowledge of spiritual Things by preaching them by their respective earthly Parallels: I betook myself to preach upon some Metaphors. . . ’187 Keach's poetry is therefore that of a man well versed in grammar and rhetoric. It is seen at its best not in his hymns (written for the most part in Short Metre and Common Metre) but in the heroic couplets of The Glorious Lover (1679) and War with the Devil (1673). The latter was sufficiently orthodox and severe to disarm most Puritan suspicion. Its title would perhaps be reassurance enough: War with the Devil: or the Young Man's Conflict with the Powers of Darkness: in a Dialogue. Discovering the

184

Benjamin Keach, The Banquetting-House, or, A Feast of Fat Things (London, 1692), 1.

185

The Banquetting-House, 6.

186

An Exposition of the Parables, 2. Keach was particularly interested in what he called ‘dark texts’ (p. 284), which provided an imaginative and intellectual challenge: ‘we readily grant, as the proverb is, metaphors and parables do not run on all four’ (p. 8).

187

Benjamin Keach, ‘Preface’, Tropologia: A Key to Open Scripture Metaphors (London, 1681).


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Corruption and Vanity of Youth, the Horrible Nature of Sin, and Deplorable Condition of Fallen Man. It is a Puritan account of a spiritual progress, in which the youth goes through the stage of being worldly— With Periwig, and Muff, and such fine things, With Sword and Belt, Goloshoos, and Gold-rings,— He is gradually changed, and becomes ‘a great Professor’ (a word of considerable abuse in Puritan literature); but it is only when he confesses his own unrighteousness that the grace of Jesus Christ can descend upon him. At that point there is a hymn: My soul mounts up with Eagles wings And unto thee dear God, she sings; Since thou art on my side, My enemies are forc'd to fly, As soon as they do thee espy; Thy Name be glorify'd. The choice of an 88.6.D stanza suits Keach's material better than his customary S.M. or C.M., and these hymns give a new kind of rhythmic life, one which does not think in two-line units but in three, and which conveys exaltation and celebration. Another of the hymns at the end of War with the Devil, ‘Divine Breathings’, uses a similar metre for a Puritan tirade: Let Grace and knowledge now abound, And the blest Gospel shine so clear, That it Romes Harlot may confound, And Popish darkness quite cashier: O let thy face on Sion shine, But plague those cursed Foes of thine. And let thy brightness also go, To Asia and to Africa; Let Egypt and Assyria too Submit unto thy Blessed Law:— Keach's missionary zeal is part of his unwavering attachment to a particular kind of community, one that was convinced of its own rightness. To this end, a hymn from Keach's last hymn-book, A Feast of Fat Things full of Marrow (1696) was entitled ‘Saints the Salt of the Earth’: If Saints, O Lord, do Season all amongst whom they do Live, Salt all with Grace, both Great and Small they may Sweet Relish give; And blessed be thy glorious Name, in England Salt is found;

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Some Savoury Souls who do Proclaim thy Grace which doth abound. But O the want of Salt, O Lord, how few are Salted well; How few are like to Salt indeed, Salt thou thy Israel! Keach's use of the Common Metre stanza is basic, an unimaginative and plodding exploration of the initial figure. But the hymn expresses the sense which the Nonconformists had of themselves as a peculiar people, as ‘Saints’, and as Israel among the Philistines. This feeling was greatly strengthened by the Act of Uniformity and its aftermath: as Horton Davies has noted, the persecution ‘excluded the hypocrites from worship, and retained only the faithful remnant’.188 Keach's hymns were rooted in the metrical traditions of the Reformation: Come let us bow and praise the Lord, before him let us fall; And kneel to him, and him adore, for he hath made us all. He is the Lord, he is our God, for us he doth provide: We are his Flock, he doth us Feed, His Sheep, he doth us Guide— These crude verses could have been written by anyone who was versed in the Anglo-Genevan Psalter, for they just ring the changes on conventional imagery. Similarly, Keach's portrayal of True Godliness as having ‘nothing more foreign to him’ than ‘those pompous garbs, superstitious vestments, images, crossings, salt, oil, holy water, and other ceremonies’189 might have been the sentiments of any Puritan in the seventeenth century. Keach is interesting, to a great extent, because he is so representative of these Nonconformist traits. His societies are those ‘whose Heart the Spirit tyes’, and his hymnody is addressed to the needs of those societies. However important ‘heart-religion’ may have been to Keach, however, its true inwardness will be found in the poetry of Richard Baxter.

Richard Baxter Baxter was a generation older than Keach. He served as a minister of the Church of England from 1640 onwards, spending some time as a chaplain in the Parliamentary army and writing his best-known book, The Saint's Everlasting Rest (1649), until he was ‘cast out’ in 1662. During the previous

188

Davies, Worship . . . from Andrewes to Baxter and Fox, 452.

189

Benjamin Keach, Travels of True Godliness (London, 1683), 29.


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year, Baxter had been one of the principal figures in the Savoy Conference, which had been designed, in the benign aftermath of the Restoration, to accommodate the differences of various Protestant moderates in a modified Prayer Book; he was an accomplished liturgist, who during this conference produced a Service Book of his own as an example. The failure of the Savoy Conference, and the Act of Uniformity which followed, confirmed Baxter in his dislike of extremism. Years before, as a chaplain in the army, he had noted in 1645 that ‘a few proud, self-conceited, hot-headed Sectaries had got into the highest places, and were Cromwell's chief favourites’;190 and at the Restoration he found himself faced with intransigent Bishops and a vengeful Cavalier Parliament. His well-intentioned Political Aphorisms, or A Holy-commonwealth (1659) was scurrilously attacked, and Baxter spent much of his life being denounced by people with less integrity than himself. This may have been the result of a certain theological elusiveness: ‘You could not’, he wrote, ‘(except a Catholick Christian) have trulier called me than an Episcopal-Presbyterian-Independent.’191 Baxter was a voluminous writer: his wife's opinion of his books was that ‘fewer well studied and polished had been better’,192 but he was habitually impelled to write by some political or religious occasion. His work shows great variety, but to the factions of Nonconformity he consistently preached the need for unity and love. It is not surprising that in the midst of all this unrest, Baxter should have written his most celebrated book on the text from Hebrews 4: 9: ‘There remaineth, therefore, a rest for the people of God’. His poems likewise show a contrast between the soul on earth, ‘wearied with the burden of sin and suffering, and pursued by law, wrath, and conscience’,193 and the glories of heaven: You blessed Souls at Rest, That see your Saviour's face, Whose glory, even the least Is far above our Grace; God's Praises sound, As in his sight, With sweet delight, You do abound. This verse comes from Baxter's best-known hymn, ‘Ye holy Angels bright’, printed in his Poetical Fragments of 1681. There it is entitled ‘A Psalm of Praise’, to be sung ‘To the Tune of the 148 Psalm’. It is modelled closely on

190

Richard Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae, ed. Matthew Sylvester (London, 1696), i. 50.

191

N. H. Keeble, Richard Baxter, Puritan Man of Letters (Oxford, 1982), 22–3. The phrase ‘theologically elusive’ is Keeble's.

192

G. F. Nuttall, Richard Baxter (London, 1965), 115.

193

The Practical Works of the Rev Richard Baxter, ed. William Orme (London, 1830), xxii. 30.

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the metrical psalm pattern, although its references to the Saviour show that Baxter was anticipating Watts in his departure from a strict paraphrase or versification. The poems of Baxter from which hymns have been made (selecting verses from a much longer text) deal with life in relation to death, with the means of grace and with the hope of glory. Indeed, the Preface of Poetical Fragments is signed and dated: London, At the Door of Eternity. Rich. Baxter Aug. 7. 1681. They are written in a clear and crisp style. His friend Matthew Sylvester, who edited his autobiography, Reliquiae Baxterianae (1696), said that ‘he was one who lov'd to see and set things in their clearest and most genuine Light’;194 and Baxter himself noted that ‘I have a strong natural inclination to speak of every Subject just as it is, and to call a Spade a Spade. . . ’.195 In religious controversy, he was conscious of a tendency, widespread in those days, to use what Sylvester agreed was ‘an acrimonious pungent Stile indeed’.196 But in addition to his sharpness and clarity, Baxter had a complex awareness of religious experience. His Christianity is tentative and open, more aware of the complex forces of hope and despair that afflict most of those who are not completely assured of their own redemption.197 The title-page of Poetical Fragments, for example, is a remarkable example of a multilayered, intricate text, with interacting signifiers operating in many different directions: it is described as ‘Heart-Imployment with God and It Self’ and as ‘The Concordant Discord of a Broken healed Heart’ which is ‘sorrowing-rejoycing, fearing-hoping, dying-living’. In these contrary movements Baxter asserts the complexity of religious experience, and the primacy of the inner life, ‘heartimployment’ rather than Keach's public preaching. The centre of Baxter's attention in these poems, therefore, is the Christian individual, suffering and rejoicing, seeking for God, often in misery and despair but always in faith, and condemned joyfully to go on pilgrimage. In the process, the poems about himself are the poems about God and it is not surprising to find echoes of Herbert. Indeed, a poem entitled ‘Divine Love's Rest (Written on Herbert's Poems)’ appears in this volume; and in ‘The Epistle to the Reader’ which prefaces the book, Baxter pays tribute to Herbert: ‘Heart-work and Heaven-work make up his Books’. In the conjunction of ‘heart-work’ and ‘heaven-work’ we may see the origins of Baxter's own subtitle of ‘Heart-Imployment with God and It Self ’: and

194

‘Preface’, Reliquiae Baxterianae.

195

Ibid., i. 137.

196

‘Preface’, Reliquiae Baxterianae. Sylvester is here quoting Baxter himself.

197

Ibid., i. 9.


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this may be one reason why Baxter's poems are still sung as hymns, while Keach's are not. Baxter, like Herbert, is one ‘that speaketh things by words feelingly and seriously’. No one would doubt Keach's seriousness, but Baxter and Herbert have the immense advantage of understanding the complexities and contradictions of human feeling. Baxter's poetry is an expression of his own heart, and he is not afraid to lay bare his grief, referring in the prefatory Epistle to his beloved wife's recent death (in the same year that Poetical Fragments was published) and to his consequent resolution ‘to be passionate in the open sight of all’. It is a passion for Heaven which is found in Baxter's work: Ye holy Angels bright, Which stand before God's Throne, And dwell in glorious Light, Praise ye the Lord each one. You there so nigh Are much more meet Than we the feet, For things so high. The infelicities and awkward moments are obvious here, but so are the successes: the choice of ‘bright’, for example, is crucial in portraying the luminous presence of the angels in heaven, and the ‘i’ rhymes—bright, light, nigh, high—assist this. From the central radiance of God and his angels, dwelling in light, Baxter moves to describe the ‘blessed Souls at Rest’, who have moved from a state of grace on this earth to a greater glory above. From this point, the poem moves from heaven to earth, to ‘All Nations of the Earth’ and then to ‘Ye Saints that on him call’ and (with an eirenic ecumenism) ‘his holy Churches all’. Then in verse 5 of the original text, Baxter turns to the individual soul: My Soul, bear thou thy part: Triumph in God above: With a well-tuned heart, Sing thou the Songs of Love. Thou art his own, Whose precious Blood Shed for thy good, His Love made known. The pivotal moment is the pause between the four 6.6.6.6. lines and the 4.44.4. ones. Baxter uses it to change direction, or to supplement, or to explain (as he does here); but the verse is held together by more than meaning and rhyme. It is about music, the ‘Songs of Love’, which are to be sung by the well-tuned heart, just as in verse 2 the blessed souls at rest were to ‘sound’ the praises of God. That music is the expression of love by

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human beings; God's expression of his love is through the shedding of his blood. Love speaks to love, and at the end there is a vision of the whole chorus, singing in that heaven which is the saint's everlasting rest: With thy Triumphant Flock, Then I shall numbered be, Built on th'Eternal Rock, His Glory we shall see. The Heav'ns so high, With Praise shall ring, And all shall sing In Harmony. ‘The Covenant and Confidence of Faith’, from which the second of Baxter's still-extant hymns comes, is an example of Puritan Covenant theology. The verses enact the demanding encounter between God and the human self with a regularity of form and a graceful accommodation of the sense to the line. Human speech is used in simple and natural units: Now it belongs not to my care, Whether I die or live: To love and serve thee is my share: And this thy grace must give. The ‘Now’ (amended to ‘Lord’ when this verse begins the hymn) is important in the original text. It is one of the words, together with ‘here’, which indicates a moment of decision. From this point onwards, the poet passes to God the responsibility for some vital decisions—matters of life and death, we might say. God's care is now whether the covenanter should be allowed to die or live: the human share of the bargain is love and service. The verse places the doubles in opposition—die or live . . . love and serve. . .—and signals it also with the strong rhymes, care/share . . . live/ give. The formality of the patterning gives a decorous shape to the proceedings, a quasi-legal formality which orders the extreme and demanding contract, the total surrender of the self to God. Baxter's control is formidable, disciplined, suggesting that this is not an emotional commitment but a determined and rational process: the last line, in particular, is calculated to hold God to his part of the contract. Yet such is the complexity of the relationship that God's part of the bargain is to allow man to fulfil his part, to have his share of love and service. The contrast between human and divine, between grace on earth and glory in heaven, is found throughout: Then shall I end my sad complaints, And weary sinful days; And join with the triumphant Saints, That sing Jehovah's Praise.


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The rhymes hold the contrast—complaints/Saints . . . days/Praise. And at this point it appears that the hymn is resolving itself into a triumphant conclusion: the covenant has led to the great reward, and to the singing in glory. But even now Baxter complicates matters, questioning yet further, proclaiming his human ignorance. The last verse is concerned, not with some transformation of the human soul into a saint in heaven, but with the limitations of human understanding: My Knowledge of that Life is small; The Eye of Faith is dim: But it's enough that Christ knows all; And I shall be with him. The rhymes again carry the oppositions: ‘small’ and ‘dim’ are in contrast to ‘all’ and ‘him’. Christ knows all, and is all, and has been all, the sufferer in the dark rooms; and in the simplicity of the last line the soul, and the hymn, come to rest in him. In Poetical Fragments this hymn is succeeded by a note, which sharpens the focus by reminding the reader of Baxter's personal experience of short life and bereavement in the death of his wife: ‘This Covenant my Dear Wife in her former Sickness subscribed with a cheerful will.’ The hymn is thus about life and death, about grace on earth and glory in heaven, and about Christ as the incarnate God, the word made flesh that he might be known and followed, even through dark rooms: Christ leads me through no darker rooms, Than he went through before: He that into God's Kingdom comes, Must enter by this Door. The simplicity of the verses, in other words, conceals an immense richness, a disciplined statement of the central problems of human living, of life, and death, of sin and forgiveness, and an expression, too, of the hope of immortality. Another hymn in current use, ‘He wants not friends that hath thy love’, is taken from ‘The Resolution’, written in the immediate aftermath of 1662 with the reference ‘PSAL. 119.96.’, which is ‘I have seen an end of all perfection: but thy commandment is exceeding broad.’ Baxter had indeed seen an end of all perfection, with his hopes dashed for a holy commonwealth, or even for some degree of religious toleration. Once again the quotation, and the reminder ‘Written when I was Silenced and cast out, &c’ sharpens the poem into one of personal experience: He wants not Friends that hath thy Love, And may converse, and walk with thee: And with thy Saints here and above; With whom forever I must be.

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The Long Metre line, with its eight syllables, is here used to great effect, producing an impression which is quite different from ‘Now it belongs not to my care’. The monosyllabic first line seems very long and measured, as if the poet had shaken off the false friends and turned to the new: and the second line supports the first by reminding us not just of the theory, of the love of God, but of what friends do together—talking and walking; and as the verse goes on they are joined by other friends, in a fellowship of holiness. The saints are Baxter's fellow-believers on earth, together with the saints in heaven, and the next verse carries on the idea; the dignity of the L.M. stanza permits another line of resonant diction: In the Communion of Saints, Is Wisdom, Safety and Delight: And when my heart declines and faints, It's raised by their Heat and Light. Here the word ‘Communion’, coming as it does after the unstressed first foot, demands attention for all its four syllables: probably the major stress is on Communion, which gives a pattern through the line of three unstressed followed by one stressed syllable. This changes in line 2, to accommodate the three nouns, each of which has an emphasized syllable. In the second part of the verse, the rhythm changes, as ‘declines and faints’ is answered by ‘Heat and Light’. The verse is full of nouns, chiefly in lines two and four: between them are the two elements in Baxter's equation, ‘my heart’ and ‘the Communion of Saints’. It is a direct example of heaven-work and heart-work: As for my Friends, they are not lost: The several Vessels of thy Fleet, Though parted now by Tempests tost, Shall safely in the Haven meet. The first line is strikingly assured, and that assurance (made the more incapable of contradiction by the colon which concludes the line) is developed in the lines which follow. They play upon the meaning of ‘lost’: as we read the first line we may think ‘they are not lost—to me’, and this idea continues to survive throughout the verse, even when ‘lost’ is turned into a metaphor by the unexpected image of the ships at sea. The friends are now the vessels of God's fleet, journeying home to God, to the Haven of heaven, the heaven-haven; and ‘lost’ now means ‘lost at sea’—either drowned, or mis-navigated. We know from line 1 that these friends are not lost, but the idea of ships and the possibility of being lost at sea is a reminder of how precarious the journey is. The stanza is balanced very delicately between assurance and fear: the third line, in particular, with its tempests and partings, is brilliantly inserted between the vessels and their safe harbour. In the very act of reading/singing, the dangers have to be crossed, until, in line 4, the person who undertakes to journey through the verse finds himself


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in safe water. At the end of line 3, the reader is all at sea, in more than one sense: at the end of line 4, he has crossed the harbour bar and come to rest. In this verse, the danger was presented with great clarity and force; in later verses it lessens, and now it has disappeared. The poet is signalling his growing confidence, and now he can envision heaven, and the friend who is the best and surest of friends: The Heavenly Hosts, world without end Shall be my company above: And thou my Best and Surest Friend: Who shall divide me from thy Love? The poem ends with a question, but it is a question that has already been answered in the gradual triumph of the earlier verses: earthly divisions are destroyed by the power of love. The poem is called ‘The Resolution’, and the title should be understood in two senses. At one level it is the poet's resolution, his resolve and determination to do what is right in a difficult situation; at another it is the resolution, that which is a solution to the problems which he finds himself faced with, and which are delineated in the questions which the poem asks. The poem is thus a poem for a special occasion, 1662: but it is also a poem which is valid for all time, because it describes persecution and loss, and the triumph of the human spirit over tyranny.198

John Bunyan Bunyan's poetry, as his most recent editor points out, has received much patronizing comment of the ‘homely, rustic, occasionally good’ kind.199 Without overstating the case, Graham Midgley draws attention to Bunyan's development as an artist, his increasing skill at handling different line-forms and metres, and his place in the tradition of Puritan writing. The influence of the metrical psalms is strongly felt, and verses of Sternhold and Hopkins are quoted in The Pilgrim's Progress: for example, the ‘song of the Interpreter’ is a verse from William Whittingham's twenty-third psalm, ‘The Lord is only my support’. But Bunyan transcends his sources: ‘Long before Thomas Kelly,’ writes Midgley, ‘Bunyan sings’: The Head that once was Crown'd with Thorns, Shall now with Glory shine,

198

Baxter was strongly influenced by Edmund Bunny's A Book of Christian Exercises appertayning to Resolution (1584), taken from the work of the Jesuit Robert Parsons and known as ‘Bunny's Resolution’. See Owen C. Watkins, The Puritan Experience (London, 1972); N. H. Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England (Leicester, 1987), 158.

199

John Bunyan, The Poems, ed. Graham Midgley (Oxford, 1980), introduction pp. xxv–xxviii.

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The Heart that broken was with Scorns Shall flow with life divine. This is a verse (lines 630–3) from One Thing is Needful: or, Serious Meditations upon the Four Last Things.200 It is a poem, as the title indicates, in four sections, in the 8.6.8.6. metre. Bunyan is capable of treating this metre in a perfectly conventional way, as in the line which was later taken up by John Newton, from the ‘Heaven’ section: There he will show us how he was Our Prophet, Priest, and King, And how he did maintain our cause, And us to Glory bring. (598–601) At other points, however, Bunyan experiments with a multiplication of nouns or verbs, as if the stanza were too small for everything he wants to cram into it: Death puts on things another face Than we in health do see: Sin, Satan, Hell, Death, Life, and Grace How great and weighty be— (166–9) Live, die, sink, swim, fall foul, or fair Death still holds on his way— (202–3) Bunyan's force and energy seems frequently to be pushing against the limitations of this stanza form, filling it with proverb and insight, over-crowding it; just as The Pilgrim's Progress, Bunyan tells us, pushed out of the way another book that he was writing. This information comes from the ‘Author's Apology for his Book’, which not only vividly describes the excitement of the creative ideas multiplying ‘Like sparks that from the coals of Fire do flie’ but also defends the use of metaphors. To the objector who says that ‘Metaphors make us blind’, Bunyan responds with the traditional Puritan defence of the examples in Holy Scripture: Was not God's Laws, His Gospel-laws in olden time held forth By Types, Shadows and Metaphors? Similarly, says Bunyan, the prophets used metaphors; St Paul, ‘grave Paul’, nowhere forbade parables; and his own ‘dark and cloudy words’ do but hold The truth, as Cabinets inclose the Gold. (128–9) Bunyan's awareness of metaphor and its importance is the foundation of his narrative in The Pilgrim's Progress. His strength in that masterpiece is his

200

Third edn. 1683, first edn. perhaps 1665.


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ability to fictionalize the Christian life in an authentic way by dividing up the features of religious experience. Faithful, Hopeful, and Christian represent different aspects of the pilgrim's life. While Baxter wrote of the heart ‘Sorrowingrejoycing, fearing-hoping, dying-living’, in an attempt to express something of the paradoxical and often contradictory nature of religious experience, Bunyan divides up his ‘fearing-hoping’: Christian falters and despairs in the river, while Hopeful cries ‘Be of good cheer, my brother, I feel the bottom, and it is good’; Faithful is martyred at Vanity-Fair, and at his death ‘straightway was carried up through the Clouds, with the sound of Trumpet, the nearest way to the Coelestial Gate’. Bunyan's poems in The Pilgrim's Progress (except for those at the beginning of each part) exist in this fictionalized setting. They are spoken by characters, and they apply to particular circumstances. Two of them survive as hymns in current use, but their original function as character speech places them closer to the dramatic monologue than most hymns. It is fortunate that their particular meaning, mode of address, and intonation, makes them capable of being taken over and used by others as expressions of religious experience. The first is the song of the Shepherd's Boy in the Valley of Humiliation (in Part II). It is a song which sets him apart from those people whom Bunyan and Keach delineate so well, the Worldly-Wisemen, the Hold-the-Worlds, the Ignorances: He that is down, needs fear no fall, He that is low, no Pride: He that is humble, ever shall Have God to be his Guide. Here the 8.6.8.6. stanza is used with considerable skill and sophistication. The Shepherd's Boy is clearly one who can use language with care and attention, using simple monosyllabic words to say complex things. In verse 2, also, Bunyan abandons the anaphora of ‘he that is’ for a freer and less rhetorical mode and a more flexible metre. The iambic regularity of line 1 makes the reader throw the stresses rightly: I am content with what I have where ‘I have’ echoes ‘I am’, and ‘content’ (stressed heavily on the second syllable) refers both backwards ‘I am content’ and forwards ‘content with . . . ’. The second line begins with a totally unexpected trochee Little be it, or much: The compact, awkward line, in which the stress falls heavily on ‘much’, echoes the compression of verse 1, because again the verb is shared in a zeugma: here the staccato ‘Little . . . it’, and the comma following, cause the

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reader to vocalize the line with a jerky stutter, only to find relief in the flowing rhythm of lines 3 and 4: And, Lord, Contentment still I crave, Because thou savest such. A trochaic foot begins the third verse, and changes the rhythm of the verse unit. Instead of the second line being abrupt, as it has been, the first line is the one in which the verse order deviates strongly from the norm: Fulness to such a burden is That go on Pilgrimage The unusual word order throws the emphasis upon ‘fulness’ (prosperity) and ‘burden’, the words echoing each other in assonance and stress. The ‘such’ in the centre of the line picks up the ‘such’ at the end of line 2, who are the saved and the contented; in this verse they are still on pilgrimage, the word with its three syllables echoing ‘Contentment’ in verse 2. This second line comes out with sweet simplicity in contrast to line 1; and the pattern of disrupted syntax followed by natural and spoken word order is continued in the last two lines: Here little, and hereafter Bliss Is best from Age to Age. The third line contrasts and sounds ‘here little’ and ‘here after’, the first an adjective used as a noun, the second an adverb used as a noun, so that ‘hereafter’ can mean both ‘later’ and ‘in the hereafter’. The line then has a further syllable, ‘Bliss’ linking with ‘little’ and counterpointing the ‘here . . . here’ rhythm; after such complications, the poem concludes with an apparently simple line, completely regular in its iambic feet, with the stresses falling on ‘best . . . Age . . . Age’. The word ‘best’ calls into itself a whole life-style, as it does in Milton: who best Bear his milde yoak, they serve him best (Sonnet XVI) and in Bunyan this ‘best’, the way of life that has been portrayed throughout the poem, falls beautifully at the beginning of the final line. It is adjective, adverb, and noun, in the poem where all kinds of grammatical transformations take place: it is ‘the best (life)’, but also it ‘best’ to do what is ‘the best’. Throughout the poem the Shepherd's Boy has played with words that can be used as different parts of speech in this way: ‘fall’, ‘humble’, ‘little’, ‘content’; nouns and verbs, adjectives and nouns, abstract and concrete meanings, all these jostle one another—as in ‘content’ and ‘Contentment’, or in ‘little’ meaning ‘small’ or ‘few possessions’, or in ‘fulness’, an abstract/concrete noun used here to mean material prosperity,


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and linked to the concrete/metaphorically abstract noun ‘burden’. In the last line, the three words engage in this complex interplay of meaning and syntax: just as ‘best’ can be adverb or noun, so ‘Age to Age’ can mean part of a person's lifetime, from one age to another, or it can mean from one age of time to another, or for ever and ever: so that the Shepherd's Boy's rule of life is valid for him, in his lifetime, and for others in theirs, but it is also true for all human beings and for all time. The three verses appear simple: they are precisely calculated for the situation. Mr Greatheart urges the pilgrims to listen carefully: Then said their Guide, do you hear him? I will dare to say, that this Boy lives a merrier Life, and wears more of that Herb called Hearts-ease in his Bosom, than he that is clad in Silk and Velvet;— The same deceptive skill is found in Mr Valiant-for-Truth's song, which must be one of the best-known hymns in the language. The craftsmanship is exercised in a different way here, with much more of the reader's attention being thrown on to the rhymes. Bunyan clearly enjoyed using rhymes to make his point, and was well aware of their effect: in A Book for Boys and Girls (1686) much of the pleasure comes from seeing Christian ideas and emblems neatly parcelled up into rhymes. On one occasion, ‘Of Man by Nature’, the effect is spectacular: From God he's a Back slider, Of Ways, he loves the wider; With Wickedness a Sider, More Venom than a Spider. In Sin he's a Confider, A Make-bate, and Divider; Blind Reason is his Guider, The Devil is his Rider. The stanza in Mr Valiant-for-Truth's song is not so insistent, but some of the poem's distinctive vigour comes from the short lines, 6.5.6.5.6 6 6.5, and the unexpected rhyme scheme, which begins with a quatrain, ABAB, followed by three rhyming lines CCC, and a fourth unrhymed D. The unrhymed line, repeated at the end of each verse, emphasizes the conclusion to which everything else leads, and makes the word ‘Pilgrim’ stand out from all the rhymed line-endings: it is the conclusion to which everything else leads, in verse-form, rhythm, and syntax, as well as in meaning. The rhymes are screwed together awkwardly in the first part of each stanza, with discords in the vowel sounds: Who would true Valour see Let him come hither; One here will Constant be, Come Wind, come Weather—

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Who so beset him round, With dismal Storys, Do but themselves Confound; His Strength the more is— Hobgoblin, nor foul Fiend, Can daunt his Spirit: He knows, he at the end, Shall Life Inherit Rhymes such as ‘Storys/more is’, ‘Fiend/end’ or ‘Spirit/Inherit’ give an impression of ruggedness; but they are followed in each case by an assured triple rhyme: the verse form itself proceeds, like the pilgrim's life, through rough ways and plain. Mr Valiant-for-Truth sings with the roughness, and the assurance, of a man of war—assured because he is rough: No Lyon can him fright, He'l with a Gyant Fight, But he will have a right, To be a Pilgrim. The movement of each verse switches from the rough to the smooth, from alternate rhymes, oddly executed, to consecutive ones. Similarly the metre is often irregular, and the syntax is unusual. Every verse, however, moves through its various processes to come out at the end with a simple statement ‘To be a Pilgrim’. The straightforwardness of the infinitive (the simplest of all infinitives, ‘to be’) followed by the noun allows the complexities of the verse to be gathered up and resolved in the state of being a pilgrim—which is a simple, and yet a demanding occupation, requiring bravery, strength, and perseverance: Bunyan's way of putting it is ‘He'l labour Night and Day’. By placing the word ‘Pilgrim’ at the end of each verse, by leaving it unrhymed, and by allowing the triple rhymes to build up beforehand, Bunyan foregrounds ‘Pilgrim’, and everything that happens in the verses beforehand becomes subordinate to it, or gathered into it—courage, constancy, the refusal to listen to fearful tales, the refusal to be put off by what people say. The positives and negatives interlock in the poem, and form strong patterns: Mr Valiant-for-Truth makes claims, such as ‘One here will Constant be’, but he is also well aware of the pressures upon him and the need to defend himself from them. So there are verbs of confidence, present and future tenses—‘will Constant be’, ‘Shall Life Inherit’, ‘will have a right’, ‘His Strength the more is’, ‘He'l fear not . . . He'l labour’—which are opposed to the denied negatives—‘no Discouragement’, ‘No Lyon’, ‘[No] Hobgoblin, nor foul Fiend’. Together they make up a comprehensive defence and attack, the defence in each stanza giving way to increasing confidence and the multiplication of future tenses:


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He'l fear not what men say, He'l labour Night and Day, To be a Pilgrim. The defied evils, discouragement, lions, giants, hobgoblins, and so on, are a reminder that the pilgrim's life is difficult: the book itself illustrates that fact in almost every episode. What is required is true valour, which is why the first line is so important: true valour as opposed to false valour, initial bravery (the Anglo-French word must have been preferred to ‘courage’ for its chivalric associations), the bravery which is constant. Mr Valiant-for-Truth cleverly avoids any suggestion of boasting by the use of third-person pronouns: the nearest he comes to speaking of himself is at the beginning, with ‘one here’, which is the cry of a volunteer ready for service. Bunyan, who had served in the Parliamentary army, must have known that it was one thing to volunteer and another to continue to be a good soldier after the first flush of enthusiasm had died away. So constancy is of paramount importance, as The Pilgrim's Progress shows: the book is full of characters who set out on the journey, or who join up with the pilgrims from time to time, but who literally fall by the wayside. The poem is thus an idiosyncratic piece of writing, deviating very strongly from the natural patterns of ordinary speech in the first part of each verse, and coming closer to them in the second part, ending with the complete naturalness of ‘To be a Pilgrim’. That state is one which has its demands, but also its rewards: it is one in which pride can be taken— But he will have a right, To be a Pilgrim. The state of being a pilgrim is itself a privilege, as well as being an arduous undertaking. Bunyan's triumph is to have understood this, and to have compressed so much human experience into the space of three verses. As a hymn, it is so familiar that it is easy to forget that the word ‘Pilgrim’ is one into which so much Puritan spirituality can be subsumed.

Joseph Stennett Joseph Stennett was a Baptist, born in 1663.201 His origins are evident in his second book, Hymns compos'd for the Celebration of the Holy Ordinance of Baptism, published in 1712; but an earlier volume is more interesting. It was

201

His hymns were once well known. They were found, for example, in John Rippon's celebrated Selection of Hymns (1787). They are no longer sung in England: in the Baptist Hymn Book Companion (ed. Hugh Martin (London, 1962: rev. 1967), p. 17), Ernest A. Payne notes, apparently without regret, that ‘several of his hymns . . . continued to be sung until the middle of the last century’. One of Stennett's hymns is still to be found in the American Southern Baptist Hymnal.

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entitled Hymns in Commemoration of the Sufferings of our Blessed Saviour Jesus Christ, compos'd for the Celebration of his Holy Supper, and published in 1697. In it, Stennett exploits to the full the dramatic possibilities of the Lord's Supper: Behold the King of Glory sits At Table with his Guests: Welcomes them all with gracious Smiles, Them all with Dainties feasts. The contrast is between the greatness of the King of Glory and his action of sitting at table and feeding his guests with dainties; and in the second verse, the dainties are specified: No common Food he here presents, No common Drink provides: For Meat he gives his Flesh; for Wine The Spear his Heart divides. (Hymn IV)This is certainly ‘no common food’, but in a surprising way: the tension is between the familiar and the terrible, between the Lord's Supper as an intimate feast, and the appalling cannibalism of ‘his Flesh’. Stennett is abrupt and shocking, forcing the reader to acknowledge the literal possibilities of ‘Take, eat: this is my body’, as well as leaving him free to read the stanza in a more figurative and indeterminate way. At other times, typology is used to describe the Holy Communion more conventionally as food for a pilgrim army: Salem's Great Prince, Melchisideck, Priest of an Order most Divine, The conquering Patriarch met, and fed His weary Troops with Bread and Wine. Of the same Order Christ our Priest, The other's Antitype, and Lord, For Bread his broken Body gives, And does for Wine his Blood afford. (Hymn XXIII)Here the easily accepted parallel, in which Jesus feeds his followers as Melchisidec fed his,202 is given a jolt by the reminder that Jesus food is his broken body, with all the suggestions of torture that are conveyed by that phrase. As the title of his book suggests, Stennett's chief aim is to connect the Holy Communion with the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. As a Dissenter, he would have held what Horton Davies has described as the ‘low’ view of the

202

See Rosemond Tuve, A Reading of George Herbert (London, 1952), 71.


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Sacrament, with the Lord's Supper as a memorial of the original supper before Jesus Christ's arrest and death. That sacrifice is presented in dramatic form, with the reader as a participant in the crowd (like the audience at a Mystery Play): From Supper to Gethsemane Away our Blessed LORD did haste; Thither let's follow him, and see How he begins of death to taste. (Hymn XXI) Then, instead of the word-picture which might have been expected, Stennett abruptly changes the viewpoint, to allow the reader to see how Jesus might have felt, first as a figure with God-like, global insight into good and evil, and then as a suffering mortal. Christ is seen to suffer, not just from the brutality of men, but from the wrath of his father: His very Friends, like timorous Sheep, Are scattered from their Shepherd now: His Father's Anger wounds him deep, And down to Death all makes him bow. The remainder of this hymn is unremarkable; but the verses quoted are part of a very powerful reconstruction of the psychodrama of the Crucifixion, as well as a reminder of its physical pain. This hymn is one of a number of magnificent meditations in Long Metre in Stennett's book: in one of them the subject addresses his own soul— Hast thou, my Soul, thy Saviour view'd As on the Cross he hung and bled? Hast seen his Bruises, Wounds, and Tears, Seen him bow down his dying Head? The question is multiple in meaning and tone. It is an invitation which could be gentle, compassionate, or indignant. The problem is, as the speaker tells the soul, that it can try to describe the scene itself, but has no proper language to describe the inner conflict: . . . But thou no proper Terms canst find To paint the Torments of his Soul, The inward Bruises of his Mind. . . Stennett's awareness of this aspect of the Passion has its origins in devotional writings and sacred meditations: the Fourth Exercise in the Third Week of St Ignatius's Spiritual Exercises exhorts the soul to Taste, above all, the bitterness of the heart of Jesus, suffering at once from His own sorrows and those of His Mother, and from the rigour of his Father, who seems to have forsaken Him.

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Although the Ignatian insight is traditional, in hymnody Stennett is unusual in his perception of the psychological distress of Jesus: the idea that he is the subject of his Father's anger or rigour is indeed painful. At this point the soul appears to be leaving the scene, but is exhorted by the speaker to take a last look back: Look back once more, and view his Head His Back, his Hands, his Feet, his Side; And tell if any Sight like this Is found in all the World beside. The echo is from Lamentations 1: 12, ‘behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow, which is done unto me, wherewith the Lord hath afflicted me in the day of his fierce anger’, and Stennett is unusual in choosing to remember the last part of the verse as well as the first. Another Long Metre hymn takes up the action at the death of Jesus, with interpretations of ‘It is finished’: 'Tis finished, the Redeemer crys, Then lowly bows his fainting Head, And soon th'expiring Sacrifice Sinks to the Regions of the Dead— 'Tis done,—Old things are past away, And a new State of Things begun; A World whose Age feels no Decay, But shall out-last the circling Sun. A new Account of Time begins,— (Hymn XLIX) The inspiration of this is Revelation 21: 5: ‘Behold, I make all things new’. Stennett continually manages to combine his vivid reconstructions of the event itself with an interpretation of its significance. In this hymn the line-endings and verse-endings are used to great effect, as the soul is invited to consider the event: Hast heard how rudely he was jeer'd By those that made him groan and die? Heard him amid their cruel Scoffs, Ev'n rend the Heavens with his Cry, That doleful Cry, My God, My God, O why hast thou thy Son forsook! Hast mark'd the Anguish of his Words, The mortal Horror of his Look? (Hymn XXVI) And in another hymn, Stennett uses the phrase that was to become common among hymn-writers in the eighteenth century:


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Amazing Love! 'Tis Infinite! No thoughts its endless Depth can sound; Exceeding Heaven it self for Height, And for Extent, the World's vast Round. (Hymn VI) In his invocation of amazing love, and the imagery of depth and height, Stennett is looking forward to Charles Wesley and the eighteenth-century Evangelicals: Come pious Candidates Of Grace and Glory too, Praise your Redeemer's Love, and tell What he has done for you. (Hymn III) The two words, grace and glory, are fundamental to the Puritan gospel. The grace is found in the New Covenant between Christ and his chosen people, taking the place of the Old Covenant between God and the Jews. The New Covenant stressed the gracious and unmerited character of the covenant bond, but also required the Christian to fulfil his part of the bargain by living a good life. That life was a pilgrimage, not only of individuals, but of like-minded people in fellowship, in what Benjamin Keach called ‘distinct societies’. The goal of that pilgrimage was the final fellowship in heaven, the Communion of Saints so movingly celebrated by Baxter; and the good life on earth, led according to the New Covenant, would lead eventually to the world above. G. F. Nuttall quotes the example of an Independent church at Rothwell: They asked the way to Zion, with their Faces thitherward, saying Come, and let us join ourselves to the Lord in a perpetual Covenant that shall not be forgotten. The Tenor of which Covenant was, to walk with God together in Gospel-Faith and Order, as a particular church, in the Performance of all Duties towards God, towards each other, and towards all Men, in the Strength of the Spirit of Christ, and according to his Word.203 So, in the words of Isaac Watts, ‘glory ends what grace begun’; and the ‘heart-work’ of which Baxter writes is the inner life of all those who are joined together in one aim, the single vessels of the fleet sailing in convoy towards the distant shore. And the hymns of the Puritans are at their finest when they are the hymns of the inner self, of the rich human experience of pilgrimage, tried and tested on the journey by suffering and deprivation. And because such experience is common to all, the hymns of the seventeenth-century Nonconformists are acceptable in their doctrine to almost everyone: ‘Who would true valour see’ might have some claim to be the most un-denominational hymn in the language.

203

G. F. Nuttall, Visible Saints: the Congregational Way, 1640–1660 (Oxford, 1957), 75.

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Such hymnody stands apart from the Anglican tradition through its preference for experience over formality, decorum, or wit. It concerns itself with the individual and with the religious society, but above all with the individual and the grace of God. It is the believer's duty to examine himself, to become convinced of his unrighteousness, and to receive the grace of God into his heart. If this is the case, then he or she needs no bishop, and no Book of Common Prayer, for God dwells not in temples made with hands but in the human heart. N. H. Keeble quotes William Penn: ‘This is the evangelical temple, the Christian church, whose ornaments are not the embroideries and furnitures of worldly art and wealth, but the graces of the Spirit: meekness, love, faith, patience, self-denial, and charity.’204 This heart-religion can exist by itself, but in this transitory life it takes comfort in the fellowship and common suffering of like-minded believers, whose duty it is to live, love, and suffer together; and it is these Saints who sing the hymns of the Puritan tradition.

204

Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity, 204.

7 Isaac Watts Something in the voice penetrated to the ear of the dying. He moved his head gently, smiled, and said, ‘Jesus can make a dying-bed | Feel soft as downy pillows are’. (Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin, ch. 41) We have seen that the English hymn in the seventeenth century developed alongside the metrical psalm, and as an extension of the practice of singing psalms. It was at first concerned, as the metrical psalms were, with versifying the Bible, the sacred text; but it also developed through the religious lyric. The religious poems of Donne and Herbert and others encouraged, as the psalms did, the expression of the believer's spiritual state, and of his or her relationship with God. It was at this point in the history of the English hymn that Isaac Watts forged the different traditions into one art. Watts's hymns were based on Holy Scripture, but they also represented the thoughts and feelings of a man who was engaged with the philosophical and religious ideas of his age. Watts wrote as he did because he was born into a Dissenting tradition, with recent memories of persecution and exclusion; and his mature years were spent in the age of philosophical and religious thought which was dominated by Newton and Locke. His mature philosophical interests were shown in a funeral discourse on ‘The Happiness of Separate Spirits’, dating from 1722, when Watts entertained his listeners by imagining heaven, as ‘the world of human spirits made perfect’, in which David and Moses dwelt: But to come down to more modern times, is there not a Boyle, and a Ray, in heaven? Pious souls who were trained up in sanctified philosophy; and surely they are fitted beyond their fellow-saints, to contemplate the wisdom of God in the works of his hands. Is there not a More, and a Howe, that have exercised their minds in an uncommon acquaintance with the world of spirits? . . . There is also the soul of an ancient Eusebius, and the later spirits of an Usher, and a Burnet, who have entertained themselves and the world with the sacred histories of the church, and the wonders of divine providence in its preservation and recovery. There is a Tillotson, that has cultivated the subjects of holiness, peace, and love, by

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his pen and his practice: There is a Baxter, that has wrought hard for an end of controversies, and laboured with much zeal for the conversion of souls, though with much more success in the last than in the first.205 Watt's encyclopaedic interests are nicely set out here: Robert Boyle, the great physicist (or natural philosopher, as he would have been called) and John Ray, the naturalist and author of The Wisdom of God manifested in the Works of Creation (1691); Henry More, the Cambridge Platonist, and John Howe, a moderate Nonconformist minister; Archbishop James Usher (or Ussher) of Armagh, who wrote a history of the world from the Creation, and Gilbert Burnet, who wrote the History of the Reformation in England. Burnet, like Tillotson, was a Latitudinarian, and Watts's inclusion of these two and of Baxter is evidence of how much he valued the generosity of spirit manifested in their works and lives.206 Boyle and Ray are there because Watts eagerly embraces the new discoveries of science, and rejoices in the multiplicity of the created world.207 His joy in the created world, which is found so impressively in his hymns, is a direct consequence of his delighted reading in such writers as Ray, and it becomes an important part of his theology. It is seen throughout his work in the importance which he attaches to reason, without losing sight of its ultimate limitations: he strikes a balance between the advocates of natural light on the one hand, and the fideists, such as Dryden, on the other. Knowing God by the light of nature is not, according to Watts, a bad thing, because deism will lead eventually to Christianity.208 But he also regards reason, in the end, as suspect. We live in a fallen world, and at times (notably in times of religious controversy)— The light of nature and reason is a poor dark bewildered thing, if it hath no commerce or communication with persons who have been favoured with divine revelation.209

205

George Burder (ed.), The Works of the Reverend and Learned Isaac Watts, D. D. (London, 1810), ii. 35–6. All references to Works in the subsequent notes are to this edition.

206

Oddly, Newton is missing, although Watts acknowledged elsewhere that ‘what other opinions of that philosophy relating to the phaenomena of heaven and earth I had imbibed in the academy, I have seen reason to resign long ago at the foot of Sir Isaac Newton’, Works, v. 499, in the Preface to ‘Philosophical Essays, on Various Subjects’.

207

Works, ii. 33. The punctuation in the 1810 edition, which is inconsistent, has been amended.

208

Works, iv. 75: in A Caveat against Infidelity, Watts saw deists as honest seekers after truth: ‘The light of nature which the deist professes to take for his guide, if duly followed, will certainly lead him to believe, that religion which is so worthy of all the perfections of God, and so suited to all the necessities of man, a religion so divinely attested by prophecies before, and by miracles afterward, and surrounded with other powerful arguments, must needs come from God . . . it appears to me pretty clear and conclusive, that a deist in Great Britain who is really sincere, and persevering in his enquiries after the truth, will sooner or later become a christian, and that the mercy of God will never suffer him to live and die an infidel.’

209

Works, i. 178.

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The matter is seen at its clearest in Sermon 45, ‘The Knowledge of God by the Light of Nature, together with the Uses of It, and its Defects’. The sermon lists the advantages of natural religion at length: it enables us to come to a knowledge of the existence of God, and of the wonders of his creation; to understand his dominion over all things, and his benevolence; to understand our duty towards God, and to vindicate his conduct. But it has disadvantages, because it is prone to error, and ‘it gives but feeble influences to repentance and holiness, and very doubtful and uncomfortable ground for a sure and satisfying hope to rest upon’.210 For Watts, reason and revelation went together. He regarded deists as good and righteous people, but as lacking in the necessary gospel grace. Their separation from the Church was in part owing to the foolishness of the Church itself: If a deist, who professes nothing but natural religion, once came so far as to receive the christian faith and the sacraments, his reason would lead him into almost all the parts of christian communion, . . . It is the evil mixture of the needless and fanciful inventions of men, with the plain and common dictates of the light of nature and scripture in public religion, and the imposition of these things upon conscience, that has been the disgrace and ruin of many christian churches, . . .211 There speaks Watts the Dissenter, who claims the right to reject needless and fanciful inventions in favour of a religion that is, in his view, a right combination of reason and revelation, mutually supporting one another. He reserves the right, too, to believe some things that are mysterious. In a discussion of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, he argues that, just as there are things in nature which cannot be explained, so there are things in religion which are unaccountable; but even if there were not, God would still remain mysterious: ‘It ought . . . to be no just ground of shame to the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, that it has mysteries in it, that is to say, that it has some doctrines in it, which we could never have found out by the mere light of reason; . . . ’212 Watts's hymnody, therefore, is based on a system of belief which he drew from his study of natural philosophy and theology: it celebrates the glory of God in the created world, but it does not stop there, because it insists on the importance of revealed religion and on the saving grace of Jesus Christ. For this reason, his sacrifice on the Cross, and the commemoration of it in

210

Works, i. 506: Watts's conclusion is plain, and (as always) balanced and clear: ‘Reflection I.—Since the rational knowledge of God and natural religion has its proper uses, and especially to lay a foundation for our receiving the gospel of Christ, let it not be despised or abandoned by any of us . . . . Reflection II.—Since the knowledge of God, which is attainable by the light of nature, has so many defects, let us never venture to rest in it . . . The sun in the firmament, with the moon and all the stars, can never give us that light to see God, which is derived from the Sun of Righteousness.’

211

Works, i. 583.

212

Works, i. 167.

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the sacraments, are of great importance to Watts, and the third book of his Hymns and Spiritual Songs is devoted entirely to hymns ‘Prepared for the Lord's Supper’. At the same time, Watts was conscious, as the seventeenth-century Puritans were, of the soul in pilgrimage on the way to Zion. One of his prose fragments is entitled ‘Vanity inscribed on all things’, and meditates upon the frailty of human life in an image taken from Ovid's Metamorphoses: ‘Time, like a long flowing stream, makes haste into eternity, and is for ever lost and swallowed up there; and while it is hastening to its period, it sweeps away all things with it which are not immortal.’213 The end of the soul's pilgrimage is eternal life, which is composed of two things, holiness and happiness: The happiness of it consists in a just and comfortable sense of the forgiveness of sin, and a lively hope and persuasion of the special love of God, and the delightful harmony of all the natural powers, viz. reason, conscience, the will, and the passions.214 Watts's phrase for this (oddly Blakean) synthesis, and for the Day of Judgement, is ‘happy day’ (Blake's ‘glad day’); the phrase was later taken up by Doddridge. It is the day in which the kingdom of God shall come, and the Lord Jehovah shall be king over all the earth, and the individual soul will see Jesus: O happy day and happy hour indeed, that shall finish the long absence of my beloved, and place me within sight of my adored Jesus! When shall I see that lovely, that illustrious Friend, who laid down his own life to rescue mine, his own valuable life to rescue a worm, a rebel that deserved to die?215 This impassioned hope infuses Watts's hymnody with a Puritan zeal and enthusiasm that links him with the seventeenth-century pilgrims. It is found in his poetry, also, in such poems as ‘The Adventurous Muse’ from Horae Lyricae. But to balance that passionate utterance, there is the philosophical understanding and the logical mind which are the prerogatives of a learned man in the age of Newton and Locke. ‘Reason’, he writes in the Introduction to his Logick, ‘is the glory of human nature’.216 In such ways, Watts is poised between Puritanism and Reason, and between Reason and Revelation, his hymnody eclectically expressing the best of these different traditions. It gives his hymnody an extraordinary breadth of appeal: ‘He has’,

213

Works, iv. 641. See Ovid, Metamorphoses, xv. 179–80: ‘ipsa quoque adsiduo labuntur tempora motu, | non secus ac flumen’ (‘Time itself flows on in a constant motion, just like a river’—Loeb Library translation).

214

Works, i. 11.

215

Works, i. 394; compare i. 496: ‘Happy day, when faith, and holiness, and love, shall be found shining, and reigning amongst all that profess the religion of Christ!’.

216

Works, v. 5.

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said James Montgomery, with his usual accuracy, ‘embraced a compass and variety of subjects, which include and illustrate every truth of revelation, throw light upon every secret movement of the human heart, whether of sin, nature, or grace, and describe every trial, temptation, conflict, doubt, fear, and grief; as well as the faith, hope, charity, the love, joy, peace, labour, and patience of the Christian, in all stages of his course on earth; . . . ’217

Watts and Rhetoric Watts's early hymn-writing was the result of a dissatisfaction with the current possibilities of worship: as a young man, he disliked the psalms and hymns that were sung at the Dissenting meeting at Southampton (probably those of William Barton); so did his brother Enoch, who said that Barton ‘chimes us asleep’.218 Isaac's response to his father's challenge to do better was ‘A New Song to the Lamb that was slain’, confident, and insisting on its newness: Behold the Glories of the Lamb Amidst his Father's Throne: Prepare new Honours for his Name, And Songs before unknown. The text is from Revelation 5, with its emphasis on new song, but the verse parades its originality. It was written by a young man who had been trained in rhetoric and classical prosody at school; Watts would have absorbed the tradition of rhetoric as the art of persuasive communication,219 and he would have understood the importance of invention, the discovery of an argument which would make a case persuasive. He would also have been taught that while the ancient writers were to be imitated, they were not to be copied. Indeed, one source of Watts's strength is his ability to work within established traditions and prosodic norms, and yet find his own voice. It requires a skilled but carefully controlled technique, of the kind described in the Preface to The Psalms of David: a complete translation, or a just paraphrase, demands a rich treasury of diction, an exalted fancy, a quick taste of devout passion, together with judgment strict and severe to retrench every luxuriant line, and to maintain a religious sovereignty over the whole work.220 Watts had a rich treasury of diction: many of the examples for Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of 1755 were taken from his work. His exalted fancy appears in a number of places, and so does his devout passion. But the

217

James Montgomery, The Christian Psalmist (Glasgow, 1825), p. xix.

218

Thomas Milner, The Life, Times and Correspondence of the Rev. Isaac Watts, D. D. (London, 1834), 177; quoted by Louis F. Benson, The English Hymn (London, 1915), 113.

219

Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric (Oxford, 1988), I.

220

Works, v. 122.

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successful incorporation of these things into hymnody was the result of Watts's skill in rhetoric. As Selma L. Bishop has pointed out, the many revisions of Hymns and Spiritual Psalms suggest that he was aware of the importance of linguistic and philological principles;221 and he was also very interested in dictionaries, handbooks of grammar and rhetoric, and questions of spelling. He knew that to write well required a familiarity with linguistic resources, and a wellstocked mind.222 In his philosophical treatise, Logick (1725) and its supplement, The Improvement of the Mind (1741), he likened the state of ignorance to the condition of someone who has never travelled beyond some remote village, and who can have no sense of what exists in the outside world. ‘Furnish yourselves with a rich variety of ideas’, he writes.223 There was, he argued, a basic need for knowledge, self-improvement, philosophical and linguistic competence; and although Watts's ideas on language, grammar, rhetoric, and expression were codified somewhat later than his hymns, in Logick and The Art of Reading and Writing English (1721), it is possible to see in his hymns the same qualities which he later recommended as valuable to students of rhetoric and logic. Logic, for Watts, was not concerned with disputation, or logic-chopping, but with the search for truth; and rhetoric, truly understood, should be the servant of truth and not the varnishing of error.224 The correct use of our mental powers is a moral obligation: ‘Our wisdom, prudence and piety, our present conduct and our future hope, are all influenced by the use of our rational powers in the search after truth.’225 The great aim is clarity: A clear and distinct idea is that which represents the object to the mind with full evidence and strength, and plainly distinguishes it from all other objects whatsoever.226 Watts's hymns express this vision, because they often show this process of clarification, of the removal of obscure and confused ideas. They enact a drama in which the soul, if it could see God or heaven clearly, would at once become ordered, secure, settled. This is the point of ‘There is a land of pure delight’: O could we make our doubts remove, Those gloomy doubts that rise, And see the Canaan that we love With unbeclouded eyes

221

Selma L. Bishop (ed.), Isaac Watts, Hymns and Spiritual Songs, 1707–1748 (London, 1962), p. xxv.

222

Ibid., p. xxviii.

223

Works, v. 40.

224

Works, v. 99: ‘Rhetoric will varnish every error, so that it shall appear in the dress of truth, and put such ornaments upon vice as to make it look like virtue: . . . ’.

225

Works, v. 6.

226

Works, v. 25.

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The enchanting beauty of Watts's hymn comes from his ability to do exactly that, to make the promised land visible, like a landscape on a clear day: Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood Stand dressed in living green and it is this clarity which marks so many of Watts's finest hymns. They work because they are assured, and they are assured because they are clear: Jesus, my God, I know his name, His name is all my trust, Nor will he put my soul to shame, Nor let my hope be lost. Here and elsewhere Watts asserts ‘I know’: it is clear to him that these things are true, and in that clarity he writes. He consistently condemns obscurity, which he associates with ignorance and prejudice: the search after truth requires a mind that is clear, orderly, and able to make judgements, because it is experienced, aware of alternatives, and not ignorant.227 As part of the exercise in clarification, Watts distinguishes between different kinds of words: negative and positive terms, simple and complex terms, words common and proper, concrete and abstract terms, and ‘univocal’ and ‘equivocal’ words: ‘Univocal words are such as signify but one idea, or at least but one sort of thing; equivocal words are such as signify two or more different ideas, or different sorts of objects.’228 One of the marks of equivocal words is that they can be used in literal or figurative ways, and (long before the structuralists) Watts knew that ‘words have different significations according to the book, writing, or discourse in which they stand.’229 This careful observation of the ways in which words behave was the foundation of Watts's skill as a hymn-writer. His hymnody is not difficult or spectacularly metaphorical so much as attentive to the need to find the correct word ‘in the discourse in which it stands’ without destroying the rhyme or the rhythm: Jesus invites his saints To meet around his board; Here pardon'd rebels sit, and hold Communion with their Lord. The first two lines are reassuringly predictable, with their picture of Jesus inviting the saints: the third line startles, with the reminder that the saints are pardoned rebels, those who have fought against God: the rebels no

227

In this search for clear language Watts was following the tradition of the Royal Society, set out in Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal Society of London (London, 1667), pt I, sect. XX.

228

Works, v. 34.

229

Works, v. 39.

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longer rebel, but they sit, and sit here (the deictic ‘Here’ is an ‘equivocal’ word, meaning ‘here with Jesus’ and ‘here in this room’) where they hold (another equivocal word) ‘Communion with their Lord’. The long word ‘Communion’, coming after the pause at the end of the third line, contrasts strikingly with the simple words ‘sit, and hold’: its three (and a half) syllables, held together in the single word, emphasize its distinctive character, and its Latin origins (‘Communionem’, from ‘communis’) contrast with ‘sit’ (from Old Frisian, Dutch, and German) and ‘hold’ (AngloSaxon and Old Norse). Watts's interest in etymology, and his extensive knowledge of classical and modern languages, would have alerted him to such possibilities; his vocabulary often shows a word that has been precisely chosen to contrast with the surrounding words: Come let us join our cheerful songs With angels round the throne where the mystical grandeur of angels singing round the throne of God is enlivened by the very human sense of looking in good spirits which is implied by ‘cheerful’. Watts's practice was that of a young and ardent hymn-writer, but in course of time it was characterized by a linguistic theory, the vocabulary of which shows him to have been a structuralist avant la lettre. I have already quoted ‘Words have different significations according to the book, writing, or discourse in which they stand’, but he also knew about signifiers and signifieds: Words, whether they are spoken or written, have no natural connection with the ideas they are designed to signify, nor with the things that are represented in those ideas . . . Words and names therefore are mere arbitrary signs invented by men to communicate their thoughts or ideas to one another.230 His thought on these matters is part of a general position which involves him in both rhetoric and theology, because his passion for clarity, and for the correct use of words in the discourse, is part of his system of belief. It goes with a suspicion of unorthodoxy: Never rest satisfied therefore with mere words which have no ideas belonging to them, or at least no settled and determinate ideas. Deal not in such empty ware, whether you are a learner or a teacher; for hereby some persons have made themselves rich in words, and learned in their own esteem; whereas in reality their understandings have been poor, and they knew nothing. Let me give, for instance, some of those writers or talkers who deal much in the words nature, fate, luck, chance, perfection, power, life, fortune, instinct, &c . . . they do but amuse themselves and their admirers with swelling words of vanity, understanding neither what they say, nor whereof they affirm.231

230

Works, v. 28.

231

Works, v. 46.

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This is the Puritan suspicion of fast talkers, found also in The Pilgrim's Progress, and it is allied to the spare economy of Watts's hymns. He goes on to name the Epicureans ‘when they ascribe the world to chance’, the Aristotelians ‘when they say nature abhors a vacuum’, the Stoics ‘when they talk of fate’, and gamblers ‘when they curse their ill-luck, or hope for the favours of fortune’.232 Watts's response is the orthodoxy and clarity of the Christian religion: To God the only wise, Our Saviour and our King, Let all the saints below the skies Their humble praises bring. This antedates the composition of Logick by some years, but the impulse is the same. It is as simple and natural as Wordsworth's aim in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, but in addition to recommending ordinary language, Watts wishes to banish uncertainty, muddle, imprecise thinking, and superstition. Watts uses words with clarity and confidence; this is all part of his sense that the gospel is true, and can therefore be stated clearly: I'm not asham'd to own my Lord, Or to defend his cause, Maintain the honour of his word, The glory of his cross. Jesus, my God, I know his name, His name is all my trust, Nor will he put my soul to shame, Nor let my hope be lost. One of the problems for mortals is that they are blind, or see with partial sight, seeing through clouds, or through a glass, darkly: for Watts, faith is a matter of seeing clearly: Give me the wings of faith to rise Within the veil, and see The saints above, how great their joys, How bright their glories be. The rhythm of this hymn, a springy adaptation of Common Metre, depends for its effect on the run-on lines, with two verbs ‘rise’ and ‘see’ at the end of lines 1 and 2. It is an example of the way in which Watts's hymns depend for their effect not just on their crisp vocabulary and their clarity, but on their ‘numbers’: on the way in which the words, punctuation, stress, and rhythm become elements in the line, with the lines constituting the verse. Watts once said that ‘he had amused himself with verse from 15 years

232

Works, v. 47.

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old to 50’,233 and his classical training would have included the writing of Latin verse. His sense of the quantities of syllables (which may have come from his expertise in Latin verse) and his feeling for punctuation and pause, allow him to control not only the lines but the movement of whole stanzas. He can be utterly straightforward, as in four lines constructed on an identical pattern: My God, the spring of all my joys, The life of my delights, The glory of my brightest days, And comfort of my nights. The ‘spring of . . . life of . . . glory of . . . comfort of . . . ’ supplement each other in a way that conveys assurance and stability. He can take a biblical phrase and fit it neatly into place: Christ and his cross is all our theme; The mysteries that we speak Are scandal in the Jew's esteem, And folly to the Greek. The third feature of Watts's use of rhetoric in his hymnody is in the structure of his hymns. In Logick he commended the habit ‘of conceiving clearly, of judging justly, and of reasoning well’,234 and he liked a simple and straightforward argument. When preaching, he avoided ‘branching sermons’,235 and in a section of his Logick entitled ‘Of an Orderly Conception of Things’, he argues that ‘we must not conceive of things in a confused heap, but dispose our ideas in some certain method’. The method should be: 1. Conceive as much as you can of the essentials of any subject, before you consider its accidentals. 2. Survey the first general parts and properties of any subject, before you extend your thoughts to discourse of the particular kind or species of it. 3. Contemplate things first in their own simple natures. . . 4. Consider the absolute modes or affections of any being as it is in itself, before you proceed to consider it relatively, or to survey the various relations in which it stands to other beings, &c.236 This four-fold method is anticipated by Watts's hymns, where there is order rather than a confused heap, the same concentration on essentials, and the

233

Thomas Gibbons, Memoirs of the Rev. Isaac Watts, D. D. (London, 1780), 63.

234

Works, v. 160.

235

His comments throw light on the preaching zeal of his time. He thought it ‘a vain affectation . . . to draw out a long rank of particulars in the same sermon under one general, and run up the number to eighteenthly, or seven and twentiethly’. Gibbons, Memoirs, 195.

236

Works, v. 69.

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same contemplation of things in their simple natures and general properties. We recognize Watts's hymns partly because they are so direct, and so unwilling to be deflected from their subject: I give immortal praise To God the Father's love, For all my comforts here, And better hopes above; He sent his own Eternal Son To die for sins That man had done. The verses of this ‘Song of Praise to the Blessed Trinity’ follow in due order, each part of the Trinity contemplated in its own nature, and concentrated on for one verse; Watts's verses are instantly recognizable because (to use Wordsworth's phrase) they keep their eye on the object and are not deflected: Sing to the Lord Jehovah's name, And in his strength rejoice; When his salvation is our theme, Exalted be our voice. (Psalm 95) Thus Watts's rhetorical education, and his linguistic inclinations, equipped him to write hymns in a particular way: the fruit of his thinking is found in Logick, but it is certainly arguable that the arguments found in that work have some affinity with the characteristics of his earlier hymnody. The continual emphasis on clarity, order, and method, and the interest in philology, linguistics, and etymology, indicate something of his rhetorical inclinations. The danger is that such an analysis will lead to an undervaluing of his work: it is quite possible to believe that clarity and order are unimportant; and an analysis of Watts's hymns that stresses their clarity can easily prejudice a full understanding of his art, because it ignores the radical, experimental, and adventurous side of his work. This is found particularly in Horae Lyricae.237

Horae Lyricae Horae Lyricae is a sophisticated collection, which bears marks of Watts's scholarship and wide reading. In addition to the major Greek and Latin

237

Watts has been seen by V. de Sola Pinto as a link between the Puritan movement of the seventeenth century and the Romantic movement of the nineteenth, in an article called ‘Isaac Watts and the Adventurous Muse’ (Essays and Studies, 20 (1934), 86–107). Pinto's title refers to a poem called ‘The Adventurous Muse’, which celebrates the genius of Milton; it appears in Horae Lyricae.

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poets, he was also familiar with the work of a number of neo-Latin poets, notably the Latin psalm-writers George Buchanan and Arthur Johnston, and the Polish Jesuit Casimire Sarbiewski, known as the ‘Christian Horace’. He thought that a couplet or a stanza from Buchanan or Johnston ‘would now and then stick upon the Minds of Youth’,238 and that Sarbiewski was ‘the noblest Latin poet of modern Ages’.239 To these classical and neo-Latin influences must be added Watts's wide reading in post-Reformation religious texts, by writers such as Milton, Herbert, Baxter, and John Wilkins.240 In the preface to the edition of 1709, his general intentions were made plain: he wished to argue and to demonstrate that poetry, ‘whose Original is Divine’,241 was supremely fitted to celebrate the truths of the Christian religion. The ‘most glorious Design’ in poetry was the praise of God, and the proper Station of poetry was in the Temple of God.242 It is an uncompromising document, attacking those who would use literature for profane or licentious purposes, and citing with approval Jeremy Collier's 1698 attack on Restoration Comedy, A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage.243 He continued to have a Puritan disapproval of the stage, especially if it encroached on religious life: ‘When you address God in worship, 'tis a Fault to be borrowing Phrases from the Theatre, and profane Poets. This does not seem to be the language of Canaan.’244 At the same time, Watts deplored the absence of sacred poetry in much Puritan worship, and criticized those for whom ‘all that arises a Degree above Mr. Sternhold is too airy for Worship’.245 Book I, entitled ‘Sacred to Devotion and Piety’, begins with two poems in Common Metre which deal with precisely this problem of writing religious poetry: Who dares attempt th'Eternal Name With Notes of mortal Sound? The question gets no answer from the poem, but there is a double answer in the implication: no human being—and yet Isaac Watts can dare to attempt something. The first poem, ‘Worshipping with Fear’ is followed by a second, ‘Asking leave to Sing’, and the reader knows that this is the first poem in Book I of three. There is thus a double implication, mysteriously contradictory: that God is beyond all praise, and that it is the function of

238

Isaac Watts, The Improvement of the Mind (London, 1741), 115; quoted in Bishop, Isaac Watts . . . 1707–1748, p. xix.

239

Preface to Isaac Watts, Horae Lyricae (London, 1709), p. xix.

240

See Harry Escott, Isaac Watts, Hymnographer (London, 1962), 22, 27 ff., 261.

241

Preface to Horae Lyricae, p. iii.

242

Ibid.

243

Ibid., p. v.

244

Isaac Watts, A Guide to Prayer, 109; quoted in Escott, 220.

245

Preface to Horae Lyricae, p. vi.

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the poet to praise Him. Variations on this theme occur throughout. In ‘God's Dominion and Decrees’, the created world is portrayed as forbidden to praise until God gives the sign: Keep Silence, all created Things, And wait your Maker's Nod: God, on the other hand, needs no permission for anything: He sits on no precarious Throne, Nor borrows Leave to Be. Not only is God totally free: he is also beyond all human knowledge, the ‘Infinite unknown’ (a phrase which occurs twice): Nature and Grace, with all their pow'rs Confess the Infinite unknown. In the 1706 edition both ‘Infinite’ and ‘Unknown’ are given capital letters, which allows ‘Unknown’ to become a noun rather than an adjective, though retaining some of its adjectival properties: the phrase is destabilized, so that God becomes both the unknown infinite (with the word order reversed, as it could easily be in hymn-rhetoric) and the infinite(ly) unknown.246 In the same poem, ‘The Creator and Creatures', the self-sufficiency of God is celebrated: From thy great Self thy Being springs: Thou art thy own Original, Made up of uncreated Things, And Self-sufficience bears them all. Through the complex lines of the Long Metre stanza the poet is trying to get his mind round the idea of something made up of things that are not made, of uncreated things that are born of self-sufficience. If self-sufficience is at the centre of God, this becomes part of a general and inescapable circularity in which the original is the original of itself; the verse is a rhetorical elaboration, ingenious and intricate, on I AM THAT I AM. The only way to cut through this circularity is by using negatives, and discovering what God is not. He may have created the world, but he is not in it: Thy Voice produc'd the Seas and Spheres, Bid the Waves roar, and Planets shine; But nothing like thy Self appears, Thro’ all these spacious Works of thine. The only way to approach an understanding is through an association of God with enormous and powerful forces, the galaxy, light, flame:

246

In the 1709 edn., the possibilities are reduced by printing ‘the Infinite unknown’.

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A Glance of thine runs thro' the Globes, Rules the bright Worlds, and moves their Frame: Broad Sheets of Light compose thy Robes; Thy Guards are form'd of living Flame. The images of a glance, of robes, and of guards (trimmings), suggests a personification of some royal presence, but one which is so magnificent and remote that it defies human understanding. It almost defies conception: Watts knows that his search for sublimity is likely to end in failure, and the closer he gets to God the more his thought is ‘untuned’. Watts is often at his finest in finding imagery and rhythms which will carry the idea of God as Creator: as Thomas Gibbons, his biographer, noted, his verse has ‘a kind of bounding velocity, if I may so call it, by making one line end with a word which in sense is inseparably connected with that which begins the next’.247 There is only one thing which Watts insists upon as greater, and that is God as Redeemer. God as Infinite unknown, and yet also as Creator, almighty Maker, eternal Wisdom, is celebrated in Book I: God is to be praised by his whole creation, but he is also (in the title of the final poem) ‘exalted above all Praise’. At the same time there are poems on other subjects, most notably ‘A Hymn of Praise for Three great Salvations’ (the Spanish Armada, the Gunpowder Plot, and the expulsion of James II) which is a Puritan reading of history (Doddridge produces a similar example). Watts has a very strong sense of right and wrong, adapting Horace's ‘odi profanum’ to his own purposes in ‘The Atheist's Mistake’: Hence, ye Profane, I hate your Ways, I walk with Pious Souls— and producing a remarkable poem on ‘The Day of Judgment’ which is as vivid as a medieval wall-painting. It is ‘An Ode, Attempted in English Sapphick’, a hendecasyllabic metre with a short line as the fourth line in each verse:248 When the fierce Northwind with his airy Forces Rears up the Baltick to a foaming Fury; And the red Lightning, with a Storm of Hail comes Rushing amain down,— This daring use of rhythm and metre is one of the features of Horae Lyricae: Book I contains poems in traditional hymn or ballad metres, but also in Pindarics and in Blank Verse. In Book II, entitled ‘Sacred to Virtue, Honour and Friendship’, the variety is even more remarkable, including

247

Gibbons, Memoirs, 226.

248

Technically, this is a ‘lesser Sapphic’ line with a dactyl in the third foot, and the short line is an ‘Adonic’.

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couplets and irregular metres; and in one of its poems, ‘The Adventurous Muse’, Watts sets out his boldest statement of poetic belief. He contrasts the lesser poets, who are like ‘little skiffs’—‘Coasting in sight of one anothers Oars’—with the adventurous muse, which nor inquires, nor knows nor fears Where lie the pointed Rocks, or where th'ingulphing Sand; Climbing the liquid Mountains of the Skies, She meets descending Angels as she flys. . . Watts, anticipating Blake (as he so often does) cries enthusiastically ‘Give me the Chariot’, the prophet's chariot which can unconfin'd Bound o'er the everlasting Hills And lose the Clouds below, and leave the Stars behind. The pursuit of the religious sublime remains an ideal for Watts, one which he deliberately controls when writing hymns. In Horae Lyricae, the poems can sometimes superficially resemble hymns, but even then they have an astonishing flamboyance and energy.249 In the Long Metre ‘Come, let me love’, the opening is as explosive as Donne: Come, let me Love, or is my Mind Harden'd to Stone, or froze to Ice? I see the blessed Fair One bend, And stoop t'embrace me from the Skies!250 The movement is one of frustration, anxiety to love, meeting freedom, the bending and embracing of God from the skies. The encounter is described in language that is sexual—the lips, the look—contrasted with hardness: O 'tis a Thought would melt a Rock, And make a Heart of Iron move, That those sweet Lips, that heavenly Look Should seek and wish a mortal Love! The contrasts are not only in the imagery, but in the mode of address, for two lines of exclamation are followed by two lines of utterly simple narrative: Infinite Grace! Almighty Charms! Stand in Amaze, ye whirling Skies, Jesus the God with naked Arms, Hangs on a Cross of Love and dies.

249

Madeleine Forrell Marshall and Janet Todd (English Congregational Hymns in the Eighteenth Century (Lexington, Ky., 1982), 46) have noted a baroque effect in Watts, from the meeting of ‘an enlightened, philosophically glorious prime mover and a depraved wormlike humanity’; but that baroque effect comes from the form as well as the content.

250

In the 1705–6 edn. this poem is called ‘Christ's Amazing Love and my Amazing Coldness’; in 1709 it becomes the less enthusiastic ‘Desiring to love Christ’.

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Yet here too the contrasts are profound, between grace, and charms, and the rolling skies, and the naked arms, which at first suggest the open arms of an embrace and then turn into the outstretched arms of the crucified Christ. The effect comes from the extraordinary simplicity, from everything that the hymn does not say: Jesus, the God, ‘hangs . . . and dies’. In a later verse the arms are again open, with the hands spread: Again he lives; and spreads his Hands, Hands that were nail'd to tort'ring Smart; By these dear Wounds, says he, and stands And prays to clasp me to his Heart. The dramatic fusion of idea and language, and the introduction of direct speech, is a powerful source of energy in this hymn. It works through simple gestures, simple speech: in one verse Jesus hangs and dies; in the next one he is standing before the sinner, his hands spread out, saying ‘by these dear wounds’. The ‘and stands’ is masterly, both in its simple moment of stasis and in its placing: it becomes a still point, a moment in which the risen Saviour waits for the sinner to come to him.251 It is this kind of pictorial and dramatic effect, and this intense baroque sensuality and movement, which Watts deliberately forgoes in Hymns and Spiritual Songs.

Hymns and Spiritual Songs If Horae Lyricae contained the productions of Watts's adventurous muse, Hymns and Spiritual Songs was conceived as an aid to worship. In the Preface Watts noted the problems of psalm-singing—‘the dull indifference, the negligent and the thoughtless air, that sits upon the faces of a whole assembly, when the psalm is on their lips’.252 In providing new materials, Watts set himself to invigorate, but deliberately kept things simple: he used four metres only, fitted to the most common tunes, and ‘aimed at ease of numbers and smoothness of sound’, hoping ‘to make the sense plain and obvious’.253 He disarmed criticism by indicating that he knew very well what he was doing: ‘If the verse appears so gentle and flowing as to incur the censure of feebleness, I may honestly affirm, that sometimes it cost me labour to make it so.’ He added: Some of the beauties of poesy are neglected, and some wilfully defaced; I have thrown out the lines that were too sonorous, and have given an allay to the verse, lest a more exalted turn of thought or language should darken or disturb the devotion of the weakest souls.254

251

It may have been influenced by a similar moment of stillness in Milton's Paradise Regained, iv. 561: ‘Tempt not the Lord thy God; he said, and stood.’

252

Works, iv. 253.

253

Works, iv. 255.

254

Works, iv. 255.

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In giving an ‘allay’, or admixture of baser material to the pure metal of poetry, Watts was adding an enforced and conscious plainness to his already strong tendency towards clarity. ‘The metaphors’, he wrote, ‘are generally sunk to the level of vulgar capacities.’ If any hymns seemed too ‘poetical’, he removed them to the second edition of Horae Lyricae. Hymns and Spiritual Songs thus seems to fit perfectly Erik Routley's idea of hymn-writing as ‘lyric under a vow of renunciation’;255 but the reality is more complex. Watts's particular genius lies in combining the clarity of a rhetorician with the force and energy of the kind of religious emotion which is found in Horae Lyricae. At its greatest, in ‘When I survey’, Watts's simple art produces something quite extraordinary, a fusion of modes in which the most powerful description is treated with a detachment and a severe control. Madeleine Forrell Marshall and Janet Todd speak of ‘a subtle relationship between [an] indulgence in sensibility and Watts's asceticism’,256 but Watts is not really an ascetic. He thrills to the glories of the created world, the relationship between human and divine, and the wonder of Christ's Crucifixion and Resurrection: his is a young man's full-blooded religion,257 energetic and full of life. His chief emotions are of gratitude for salvation and praise for creation: Nature with all her powers shall sing God the Creator and the King; Nor air, nor earth, nor skies, nor seas Deny the tribute of their praise. Here the positive ‘shall’ is followed by the strong placing of ‘God’ at the opening of line 2; the second part of the verse is built upon double negatives, the four ‘nor’s waiting for the ‘Deny’ in line 4. At other times the rhetoric is more obvious, as in the repeated use of ‘How’ in the paraphrase of Isaiah 52 and Matthew 13: How beauteous are their feet Who stand on Zion's hill! Who bring salvation on their tongues, And words of peace reveal! How charming is their voice! How sweet the tidings are!— How happy are our ears That hear this joyful sound. . . How blessed are our eyes That see this heavenly light! . . .

255

Erik Routley, Hymns Today and Tomorrow (Libra edn., London, 1966), 19.

256

Marshall and Todd, English Congregational Hymns, 52.

257

Harry Escott is right to remind us of this, pp. 11–12.

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In the first two books of Hymns and Spiritual Songs the variety of mood and subject is evident: if Book I consists mainly of paraphrases, Book II is concerned with subjects pertaining to the Christian Gospel and the individual response to it. It is in the third book, ‘Prepared for the Lord's Supper’ that the greatest pressure is found, the creative tension between Watts's passionate apprehension of the suffering of Christ and a controlled simplicity. In this book are found ‘Jesus invites his saints’ and When I survey the wondrous cross’. As a final example, I take hymn 10 from this Book III, entitled ‘Christ crucified; the Wisdom and Power of God’: Nature with open volume stands To spread her Maker's praise abroad; And every labour of his hands Shews something worthy of a God. This is a simple opening, the traditional image of the world as the liber naturae; but in the second verse the ‘book’ image develops to show a picture, drawn in colours and lines like an illustration—and, as a picture often is, the most vivid part of the book: But in the grace that rescu'd man His brightest form of glory shines; Here on the cross 'tis fairest drawn In precious blood and crimson lines. In place of the book of nature, we are now given the ‘book’ of the cross. And as with ‘When I survey’, the pain of the cross is distanced without being negatived: here it becomes the fairest drawing in the book, precious with its blood and crimson lines. But books contain text as well as illustration: Here his whole name appears complete; Nor wit can guess, nor reason prove Which of the letters best is writ, The power, the wisdom, or the love. The words, power, wisdom, and love, are ‘read’ against the usual expectations of the narrative, so that the mind is presented with a succession of texts—the Crucifixion itself, and an interpretation of it as life-giving. In the Crucifixion story itself there is, of course, a text, in which ‘his whole name appears complete’: this is Pilate's ‘Jesus of Nazareth the King of the Jews’ (John 19: 19) which is refused to alter. Watts perceives the irony of Pilate's text, and then provides his own version, as though the ‘whole name’ required spelling out, past the pain and suffering, into new letters of power, wisdom and love. These are superimposed upon the earlier texts, rereading the crimson lines of blood in terms of God's grace, ‘the grace that rescu'd man’.

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For the subject of the hymn is God, creator and maker, and in this moment on the cross his inmost heart is revealed, almost as if the flesh had been cut open: Here I behold his inmost heart Where grace and vengeance strangely join Piercing his Son with sharpest smart To make the purchas'd pleasure mine. Seeing into the inmost heart of God is a way of ‘piercing’ through appearances, even as Christ suffers ‘piercing’ on the cross: and as grace and vengeance strangely join in the heart of God, so the sharpest smart of Christ becomes the purchased pleasure of the sinner, and the cross is transformed into a ‘sweet wonder’: O the sweet wonder of that cross Where God the Saviour lov'd and dy'd! Her noblest life my spirit draws From his dear wounds and bleeding side. Here the two elements, hitherto kept separate, of God's grace and Christ's suffering, are brought together into a meaningful and complex pattern. This is God himself, the creator of the universe, who as the incarnate Christ is loving and dying on the cross, and through that action giving the precious gift of life to others. His wounding and bleeding gives life to the spirit, so that the hymn can end in the hope of everlasting life and heavenly praise: I would for ever speak his name In sounds to mortal ears unknown, With angels join to praise the Lamb, And worship at his Father's throne. So the hymn which began with God the creator, the God of Genesis, whose praise is shed abroad when ‘Nature with open volume stands’, ends with God as the God of Revelation, as the Lamb that was slain and which is now worshipped in heaven. Richard Baxter's poem ‘The Resolution’ contains a verse which may have been the grain of suggestion for this hymn: The World's thy Book: There I can read Thy Power, Wisdom, and thy Love: And thence ascend by Faith, and feed Upon the better things above. Like Baxter, Watts begins with nature as a book, but before arriving at the ‘better things above’ he introduces the supreme example of God's grace, complicating the whole process of ascent by the vision of power through suffering. It is an astonishing example of the way in which even the enforced

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simplicity of Hymns and Spiritual Psalms can be used to express complex theological meanings. As Baxter had written: God biddeth us be as plain as we can, for the informing of the ignorant, and as convincing and serious as we are able, for the meeting and changing of unchanged hearts;258 Watts shares Baxter's need for plainness, as he inherits from him the Puritan tradition, and his hymns are often thrilling in their directness and clarity; at other times, his distinguishing feature is his ability to concentrate complex ideas, and express an enthusiastic sensibility in which religion becomes a matter for praise and joy, within the strict constraints of regular metre and subdued language. At the centre of Watts's assurance and praise is the grace of God and the person of Christ, and his redemptive action: ‘Christ and his cross is all our theme’. It is this evangelical vision which Watts incorporates into his last and greatest poetical work, The Psalms of David.

The Psalms of David The estimate of the Psalms as his greatest work is Watts's own.259 There are signs that he was at work upon them for a long time, and that he was acutely conscious of the particular steps that he was taking. As in the case of ‘When I survey’, his work on the psalms can be fully understood only when it is seen in the context of the conditions under which it was produced. He is one of those pivotal writers whose work looks forward but also back, gathering into itself and transforming a tradition—in this case the tradition of metrical psalmody since the Reformation. As James Montgomery wrote: ‘he so far departed from all precedent, that few of his compositions resemble those of his forerunners,—while he so far established a precedent to all his successors, that none have departed from it.’260 The full title, The Psalms of David, Imitated in the Language of the New Testament, And applied to the Christian State and Worship, clearly indicates the change from Watts's predecessors: these are not versifications of the psalms, but imitations of them in another mode, and with a new application and purpose. And because the psalms had been, since the Reformation, such highly prized examples of God's word, the transformation was a bold and irregular proceeding. Watts himself identified only one predecessor in this art, John Patrick, whose Psalms of David in Metre (1706) celebrated the providence of God in Creation and Redemption. So instead of sticking closely to the Hebrew original, or diligently recording any deviation, addition,

258

Quoted in N. H. Keeble, Richard Baxter, Puritan Man of Letters (Oxford, 1982).

259

Works, iv. 256.

260

James Montgomery, Preface to The Christian Psalmist (Glasgow, 1825), p. xx.

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or omission, Watts took the Hebrew and recast it, as if the psalmist were writing in the Christian era. It is part of a general shift of emphasis at this time from the Old Testament to the New.261 So we find the astonishing Psalm 97, which in Tate and Brady begins Jehovah reigns, let all the Earth In his just Government rejoyce; is changed by Watts to He reigns! the Lord the Saviour reigns! Praise him in evangelic strains; Watts is using the same original psalm, but reading it with a new code book. In Psalm 98, second part, he again writes of the Incarnation: Joy to the world, the Lord is come! Let earth receive her king: Let every heart prepare him room, And heaven and nature sing. In Tate and Brady this was preceded by a reference to the love and truth of Israel's God, and the parallel verse was: Let therefore Earth's Inhabitants Their chearful Voices raise, And all with universal Joy Resound their maker's praise. By transferring this to the New Testament, Watts at once takes an imaginative leap, applying the psalmist's expression to the Christian condition in which the word was made flesh. In his ‘Preface; or An Inquiry into the right way of Fitting the Book of Psalms for Christian Worship’, Watts noted that when we sing the psalms: we express nothing but the character, the concerns, and the religion of the Jewish king; while our own circumstances, and our own religion (which are so widely different from his) have little to do in the sacred song; and our affections want something of property or interest in the words, to awaken them at first, and to keep them lively.262 This is very different from the Reformation view that in the psalms were to be found all the emotions of a religious person addressing God. Watts was so concerned about the absence of specifically Christian doctrine in the psalms that he felt it necessary to add some wherever possible, to give what he called ‘an evangelic turn to the Hebrew sense’, and ‘to accommodate the book of Psalms to Christian worship’—

261

See Ronald Paulson, Hogarth, i, The ‘Modern Moral Subject’, 1697–1732 (New Brunswick and London, 1991), 280–1, 292–6.

262

Works, iv. 113.

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And in order to do this, it is necessary to divest David and Asaph, &c. of every other character but that of a psalmist and a saint, and to make them always speak the common sense of a Christian.263 Watts stated in the preface that he had consulted more than twenty versions of the psalters, and ‘they all seem to aim at this one point, namely, to make the Hebrew psalmist only speak English, and keep all his own character still’.264 He was concerned in a much more radical operation, one which would provide opportunities that were liturgically most desirable: what a hard shift the minister is put to find proper hymns at the celebration of the Lord's Supper, where the people will sing nothing but out of David's Psalm-Book.265 The usual recourse was to Psalm 23 or Psalm 118, according to Watts, but then they were forced to ‘confine all the glorious joy and melody of that ordinance to a few obscure lines’.266 Watts therefore provided them with Psalm 22, the second part, ‘Christ's Sufferings and Kingdom’. It begins with the dramatic device of direct speech, followed by setting and commentary: ‘Now from the roaring lion's rage, ‘O Lord, protect thy Son; ‘Nor leave thy darling to engage ‘The pow'rs of hell alone.’ Thus did our suff'ring Saviour pray, With mighty cries and tears; The language is daring here, especially in the dramatic opening. The ‘darling’ of line 3 is startling in its intimacy, especially in the context, spoken as a plea by Christ. Watts uses it earlier in the psalm, in the first part verse 7, ‘Behold thy Darling’. In that part, the poet brings out the contrast again between God's love for his Son, and what that Son is being asked to undergo: Why will my Heav'nly Father bruise The Son he loves so well? The Hebrew psalm, which is a dramatic cry for help from a suffering human being, is ingeniously transposed by Watts to the passion of Christ. His accomplishment of this is breath-taking in its openness and assurance: ‘Why has my God my soul forsook, ‘Nor will a smile afford?’ (Thus David once in anguish spoke, And thus our dying Lord!)

263

Works, iv. 118.

264

Works, iv. 113.

265

Works, iv. 114.

266

Works, iv. 114–15.

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The key to this is the opening of Psalm 22, ‘My God, why hast thou forsaken me’; but instead of versifying it, as any previous metrical psalmist would have done, Watts proceeds to use Christ's quotation of it as an opportunity for him to think of the whole psalm as spoken by Christ. Throughout, Watts uses the psalms: rather than following them, he makes them follow him. He leaves out some altogether, because (as he says at Psalm 28) they have ‘scarcely any thing new, but what is repeated in other psalms’; he contracts others, such as Psalm 37, and at Psalm 39 he says cheerfully ‘I have not confined myself here to the sense of the psalmist, but have taken occasion, from the first three verses, to make a short hymn on the government of the tongue.’ At Psalm 40, he persuades himself that ‘If David had written this psalm in the days of the gospel, surely he would have given a much more express and particular account of the sacrifice of Christ.’ Not only does he change the direction of the psalms in this way: he also provides his own interpretation of specific passages. Psalm 46 mentions the stream that flows through the city of God, rendered in Tate and Brady in feeble octosyllabics as A gentle Stream with Gladness still The city of our Lord shall fill— Watts firmly describes it as the stream of the gospel, bringing life, love and joy, in a mellifluous and flowing rhythm: There is a stream, whose gentle flow Supplies the city of our God: Life, love, and joy, still gliding thro', And wat'ring our divine abode. That sacred stream, thine holy word, That all our raging fear controuls: This is an interpretation which works quite satisfactorily, but which is really Watts appropriating the text for his own purposes, as he does everywhere. An example is the way in which he has ‘translated the scene of this psalm—67—to Great Britain’: Sing to the Lord, ye distant lands, Sing loud with solemn voice; While British tongues exalt his praise, And British hearts rejoice. Psalm 75 is even more vigorously taken over, ‘Applied to the glorious Revolution by King William, or the happy Accession of King George to the Throne’; and in the manner of Wither's Haleluiah, Psalm 101 is ‘The Magistrate's Psalm’ and the last part of Psalm 107 ‘A Psalm for New England’; and Psalm 124 becomes ‘A Song for the Fifth of November’,

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thus indicating how readily certain psalms may be taken over for specific concerns and special occasions.267 Watt's psalms demonstrate a fair versatility in the use of metre, employing the full range of ‘proper tunes’ and sometimes giving a version in more than one metre. His particular skill is a continuation of the mellifluous simplicity practised by Tate and Brady (he admits to having followed Tate in Psalm 139, part 3) and found in his own Hymns and Spiritual Songs, with a striking addition of dramatic effect through direct speech, together with an extraordinary felicity in placing the phrase into the line. Watt's control of textual space is remarkable: he knows the value of striking individual lines, such as ‘The Lord Jehovah reigns’ (53) or ‘Sing to the Lord Jehovah's name’ (95), but he is also finely aware of the wire-drawn relationship of one line to another: Jesus shall reign where'er the sun Does his successive journeys run: His kingdom stretch from shore to shore, Till moons shall wax and wane no more. The Long Metre stanza gives room for these successive movements, as it does in Psalm 92: Sweet is the work, my God, my King To praise thy name, give thanks and sing, To show thy love by morning light, And talk of all thy truth at night. The rhythm and punctuation are all-important here: the hymn works through a varied series of repetitions. Lines 3 and 4 parallel each other, clearly, but lines 1 and 2 also have parallels in rhythm and stress: ‘Sweet is the work / To praise thy name’. . .‘my God, my King / give thanks and sing’. ‘My God, my King’ shows the methods that will follow: not ‘my God and King’ (so altered by Toplady in his Hymns of 1776) but ‘my God, my King’, with the comma to make the singer pause and take breath (and count one, in Watts's instructions). The hymn constructs its own individual rhythm of such pauses and repetitions: My heart shall triumph in the Lord, And bless his works, and bless his word: Thy works of grace, how bright they shine! How deep thy counsels! how divine!

267

Such local usages provide their difficulties: in the United States, for example, these psalms had to be reworked after the Revolution to make them applicable to a newly independent country. An American version by John Mycall was circulating before the end of the War of Independence. Later, Timothy Dwight, President of Yale, supplied the missing psalms and tactfully removed the references to Britain in an ‘official’ version. See Louis F. Benson, The American Revisions of Watts's ‘Psalms ’ (New York, n.d. (1904) ).

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The artifice is carefully placed, and only just controlled—‘bless his works / bless his word’; rhythmically it echoes the first line, with its strong pause after the fourth syllable, a pattern that occurs throughout—‘Sweet is the work,/And bless his works / Thy works of grace’—and in the next verse— Fools never raise their thoughts so high; Like brutes they live, like brutes they die; which is a counter to ‘And bless . . . and bless’. Sometimes the echoing words are synonyms, as in the second line of the final verse: Then shall I see and hear, and know, All I desir'd or wish'd below— and the first line's verbs return an echo to the first verse (‘To praise thy name, give thanks and sing’) so that the whole psalm becomes a delicate patterning of different rhythms. Referring to David, Watts argued that ‘the royal author is most honoured when he is made most intelligible: And when his admirable composures are copied in such language as gives light and joy to the saints that live two thousand years after him’.268 The greatest example of a psalm thus ‘copied’, not given a New Testament gloss, is Watts's Psalm 90, verses 1–5, subtitled ‘Man frail, and God eternal’: Our God, our help in ages past, Our hope for years to come, Our shelter from the stormy blast, And our eternal home. The text begins with a display of rhetoric, with the repeated uses of ‘Our’, and the clear parallels of phrase—‘help in ages/hope for years’—and of word sound—help/hope, shelter/eternal. The verse signals a firm patterning of experience, a portrayal of the human perception of God as a force for good in the past and the future, as a shelter, and finally as a home; the verse comes to rest on the word ‘home’ as a final attribute of a God who is an aid to human beings in their journeyings (when they may encounter the stormy blast), and to whom they return for safety and delight. The stability of the verse is also registered by its perfect iambic patterns, with each line containing a succession of regular feet. Having thus established a primary rhythm and organization, Watts then begins to produce variations on it: Under the shadow of thy throne Thy saints have dwelt secure; Sufficient is thine arm alone, And our defence is sure.

268

Works, iv. 115.

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The flickers in the rhythm with ‘Under’ and ‘Sufficient’ are only for a moment, before the stability reasserts itself with the line-endings of ‘sure’ and ‘secure’, and the repeated use of ‘is’. The ‘eternal home’ of the first verse is where the ‘saints have dwelt secure’, and the verse continues to present metonymic figures of assurance and safety. In order to be safe, God needs to be permanent, and this is the subject of the next verse: Before the hills in order stood, Or earth receiv'd her frame, From everlasting thou art God, To endless years the same. The verse structure looks different, in that it carries the sense through four lines, instead of two-line units; but the construction is really very strong, with the adverbial clause occupying the first two lines and the main clause the second two. The rhythm is still strongly and regularly iambic, and the various lines still reinforce one another in pairs to celebrate the long-term stability of God—before the hills ‘in order stood’ (stiff, like soldiers on parade), which is a reminder of an awesome geological time, before the earth was shaped as we know it or the hills, which seem to be so permanent, came to be as they are now. It is in contrast to this God, who is ‘From everlasting . . . To endless years’ that the psalm turns to the nations, their very plurality and anonymity standing out against the concentrated singleness of God: Thy word commands our flesh to dust, ‘Return, ye sons of men’: All nations rose from earth at first, And turn to earth again. The word commands: the nations come and go, rise and fall, emerge from the earth and return to dust; they are brief changes on the surface of the earth, part of the rhythm of life and death that makes up our human time. Meanwhile God has a conception of time that is altogether beyond human possibility: A thousand ages in thy sight Are like an evening gone; Short as the watch that ends the night Before the rising sun. The evening, the night watch, the rising sun, all emphasize the human ways of experiencing time: trying to imagine God involves a radical attempt to understand a figure for whom these things are no longer themselves, but are shortened to unimaginable smallness. In God's time, a thousand ages are as an evening in our time: time rushes by, and yet God's life continues, evening after evening, thousand ages followed by thousand ages.

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The psalm beautifully contrasts such God-like stability with the transient busy-ness of human life: The busy tribes of flesh and blood, With all their lives and cares, Are carry'd downward by thy flood, And lost in following years. Human life is represented by the cliché ‘flesh and blood’, and by ‘lives and cares’; yet such busy-ness is rendered insignificant by the way in which the different and multiple tribes, like so much floating jetsam, are carried downward by a flood, and lost. The water image suggests helplessness, tiny human figures being borne along by an irresistible flood, and it continues in the following verse: Time, like an ever-rolling stream Bears all its sons away They fly forgotten as a dream Dies at the opening day. Down the river go the nations; they are forgotten, and seem increasingly unreal, dreamlike. Only God remains, and to Him we return in the final verse—‘our guard while troubles last, | And our eternal home’. Against the patterns of instability—floods, drowning, floating downstream, fragments of half-remembered dreams—there is a place to rest, home; the psalm has come back to where it began, but with a new and fuller understanding. Now the full implications of God as our home can be understood: God is all we have to rely upon in a world of transience, danger, and human weakness. And so the psalm itself comes to rest upon the word ‘home’, at the conclusion of its wanderings. The strength of the verses, the beautiful accommodation of the sense to the lines, and the structure of the hymn—beginning and ending with God—demonstrate Watts's characteristic qualities as a hymnographer at their best. Not only is his technique that of a writer who is skilled in the management of Latin and English verse and in the rhetoric of hymnody, but the assurance and purposefulness of the action—the strong contrast between the permanence of God and the transience of man—comes from a particular perception that is characteristic of Watts and his work. It is the life of Christ, and particularly his death, which are at the centre of Watts's thinking and hymnography: so that, in his lines uttered by the dying slave in Uncle Tom's Cabin, Jesus can make a dying bed Feel soft as downy pillows are,— and, in one of the few hymns by Watts to use the great pilgrimage metaphor—

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We're marching through Immanuel's ground To fairer worlds on high. It is Immanuel's ground because Christ is ‘God with us’, the Incarnate Word who has transformed human life; so for human beings, ‘Glory ends what grace begun’, and it is this vision which Watts celebrates with such confidence. His great pattern is Moses, and in ‘The Presence of God worth dying for: Or, the death of Moses', he begins with an echo of John Mason but goes on to present his own dramatic account: Thy Love, a Sea without a Shore, Spreads Life and Joy abroad: O ’tis a heaven worth dying for To see a smiling God. Sweet was the Journey to the Sky The wondrous Prophet try'd; Climb up the mount, says God, and die; The prophet climb'd and dy'd. Watts, who demanded the chariot in Horae Lyricae, was confident that he had inherited the prophet's mantle: his confidence comes from a clear programme of literary activity, and the technique to carry it out. His work has something of the egotism of a great Romantic poet such as Blake or Wordsworth, and it is extraordinary to see his proper and somewhat ingenuous pride in his own achievement, especially The Psalms of David: And whensoever there shall appear any Paraphrase of the Book of Psalms that retains more of the savour of David's poetry, or discovers more of the style and spirit of the gospel, with a superior dignity of verse, and yet the lines as easy and flowing, and the sense and language as level to the lowest capacity, I shall congratulate the world, and consent to say, ‘Let this attempt of mine be buried in silence’.269

‘When I Survey’ I propose, finally, not to discuss Watts's monstrous Divine Songs Attempted in Easy Language, for the Use of Children (1715), if only because I have compared it elsewhere to Blake's Songs of Innocence (without Watts's Divine Songs, Blake's most famous book might never have been written).270 But ‘When I survey’ is such a profound example of Protestant religious art that it deserves close examination. Its text is from Galatians 6: 14: ‘But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto

269

Works, iv. 123.

270

See J. R. Watson, ‘Romantic Poetry and the Wholly Spirit’, in David Barratt, Roger Pooley, and Leland Ryken (eds.), The Discerning Reader (Leicester, 1995), 195–217.

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me, and I unto the world’. The ‘I . . . me . . . I’ is the beginning of Watts's hymn—‘When I survey’—and one way of reading the hymn is to see it as a progressive meditation on the self, a profound enquiry into the ‘I . . . me’ in relation to the crucified Christ. ‘Survey’, too, is multiple in its signification, but sounds calm and secure.271 The first phrase is therefore very important, establishing a firm base from which the hymn can depart. However, as soon as Watts's ‘I’ sees the wondrous Cross, a process of rapid revision begins: this is not a survey of anything simple but something wondrous, which is also an instrument of death, ‘On which the prince of glory dy'd’. The contrary impressions require rapid, informed readings: they include an awareness of the event itself, the death of Jesus Christ, and also the interpretation of that event as redeeming, whereupon the Cross becomes ‘wondrous’. The action is double-sided, wonderful and dreadful, wonderful only if it is read in a particular way. At this point the first ‘I’ subject, which seemed to be so secure in the opening clause, begins to change. It is transformed into another self, which celebrates the destruction of the old self, as the elements of a personality (such as values and ambition), disappear in a series of autodestructive acts: My richest gain I count but loss, And pour contempt on all my Pride. The loss of the original self is followed by a deeper insight, and the failure of human pride is to lead to spiritual gain. This is a pattern that is found in great tragedy, in which the tragic hero such as Lear or Oedipus falls from happiness and finds self-knowledge: ‘Who is it that can tell me who I am?’ Watts's hymn is in certain ways an exploration of the same theme of the self: it begins in apparent self-sufficiency and ends in a recognition of the need for surrender: Love so amazing, so divine, Demands my Soul, my Life, my All. The Crucifixion, the great central event in Christian history, directs attention back from itself to the individual (as in Crossman's ‘O who am I?’); and just as the tragic hero is great in his downfall, so the Christian, paradoxically, takes pride in pouring contempt on his pride. The tragic pattern becomes a triumphant one.272 The believer becomes ‘dead to all the world’, subjected to demands that are comprehensive: ‘my Soul, my Life, my All’. In the simplicity of that line there is an ultimate recognition of what the self is in Christian terms. The hymn involves a self-finding, an understanding of

271

Johnson's Vanity of Human Wishes begins ‘Let observation, with extensive view | Survey mankind’, and his Dictionary lists four meanings of the word, all of them associated with a secure and authoritative stance.

272

See George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (London, 1961), 332–3.

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the self as it relates to God's love as shown in Jesus Christ. The relationship is one of what T. S. Eliot was later to call ‘a condition of complete simplicity | Costing not less than everything’,273 expressed here in the straightforward language of the last line. At one point the ‘I’ subject becomes a participant in the action, or at least a beholder of it. The third verse involves a drama, and begins as if addressing a fellow-watcher (or the reader/singer): See from his Head, his Hands, his Feet— The Crucifixion scene is revisited, and in the reaction to the events themselves, the individual not only impresses the events on the mind of the reader (who is now in the place of a fellow-onlooker) but also discovers (literally and metaphorically) ‘where he stands’. He is a watcher, but at the same time a feeling participant, given to exclaim and question: Did e'er such love and sorrow meet, Or thorns compose so rich a crown? And because the hymn is a dramatic record of his individual progress, the ‘When’ with which it begins becomes a very important signifier: it suggests that ‘Whenever’ the subject contemplates the Cross, the process begins again, in an endless repetition of the drama of self-loss and spiritual gain. The hymn also reflects the Puritan experience. The ‘I’ of ‘When I survey’ is an ‘I’ which involves a particular individual writing at a particular time. It is an opening which is as dignified as the first phrase of another poem (about not-seeing) by an earlier Puritan: When I consider how my light is spent— When I consider; When I survey: Milton and Watts are examples of the individual post-Reformation ‘I’ that writes out of personal experience and individual hermeneutics. This is the ‘I figure of Luther's ‘Here I stand’, and the ‘I’ of the Genevan exile, Anthony Gilby, for whom the psalms ‘do teach us, what we shall saie unto God’.274 Indeed, the very action of writing hymns was evidence of this individual development; in Watts's case it was the result of a dissatisfaction with what was available.275 He was asserting his

273

T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (London, 1944) ‘Little Gidding’, pt. v.

274

Quoted in Rivkah Zim, English Metrical Psalms, Poetry as Praise and Prayer, 1535–1601 (Cambridge, 1987), 28.

275

‘The hymns that were sung at the Dissenting meeting at Southampton were so little to the gust of Mr Watts, that he could not forbear complaining of them to his father. The father bid him try what he could do to mend the matter. He did, and had such success in his first essay that a second hymn was earnestly desired of him, and then a third, and fourth, etc. till in process of time there was such a number as to make up a volume’ (Gibbons, Memoirs, 254). Compare Walter Benjamin: ‘Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.’ (‘Unpacking My Library’ in Illuminations, trans. H. Zohn (London, 1970), 61).

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own creative self, celebrating his own power, and drawing confidently upon his own experience. The hymns are his ‘heart-work’, the deeply felt private vision. In this respect they are akin to the classic expressions of Christian spirituality, and also to that particular Puritan genre, the spiritual autobiography, in which the self-consciousness of the individual believer is beginning to replace the Crucifixion as the centre of interest. Watts's hymn keeps the balance: its delicate poise comes from the vividness with which both the Crucifixion and the response to it are portrayed. If the rich description of the inner life comes from the reformed tradition, the concentration on the figure of Christ owes a great deal to Watts's familiarity with meditative techniques. As soon as he decided to write about the Cross, he became one of a long line of devotional and mystical writers. Richard Baxter's The Saint's Everlasting Rest, for example, has a passage of devotional rapture: And to have this our Redeemer ever before our eyes, and the liveliest sense and freshest remembrance of that dying, bleeding love still upon our souls! . . . He cries to us, ‘Behold and see; is it nothing to you, O, all ye that pass by? Is there any sorrow like unto my sorrow?’ (Lam. 1:12) And we will scarce hear or regard the dolorous voice, nor scarce turn aside to view the wounds of him who turned aside, and took us up to heal our wounds at this so dear a rate. But, oh! then our perfected souls will feel as well as hear, and, with feeling apprehensions, flame again in love for love.276 Baxter's juxtaposition of sorrow and love find their echo in Watts's third verse, although Watts's tone is graver. It has Baxter's exaltation linked with the kind of grave note struck by George Herbert in A Priest to the Temple, or, The Countrey Parson: The Countrey Parson is generally sad, because hee knows nothing but the Crosse of Christ, his minde being defixed on it with those nailes wherewith his Master was:277 Through Herbert's poetry, the seventeenth century was linked to an earlier tradition. In Rosemond Tuve's words, a poem such as ‘The Sacrifice’ is ‘irremediably implicated in its past’.278 And as a deeper understanding of Herbert's subtle uses of religious imagery, and of his sharp ironies, can be obtained from a study of the traditional materials which he used, so Watts's hymn can be better understood if it is seen as employing well-used meditative techniques. A concentration on the Cross of Christ, for example, was a feature of Jesuit practices of meditation (which themselves have roots in earlier devotional traditions): the third week of the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius is devoted to the Passion and Death of Jesus Christ, and other

276

The Practical Works of the Rev. Richard Baxter, ed. William Orme (London, 1830), xxii. 106–7.

277

The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford, 1941), 267.

278

Rosemond Tuve, A Reading of George Herbert (London, 1952), 23.

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writings attempt a vivid reconstruction of the event.279 Such Jesuit writings would have come Watts's way through his admiration for Sarbiewski; and also through Richard Baxter's use of ‘Bunny's Resolution’280 (Baxter chose the text which Watts was later to use, Galatians 6:14, as the title of a work published in 1657, The Crucifying of the World for the Cross of Christ, in which he employs an Ignatian technique). Watts's hymn is thus part of a tradition which was very old, but which was constantly being modified to suit the historical circumstances. Baxter's book, for example, was a new application of Holy Scripture, addressing the text from Galatians to the worldly and prosperous. Watts's hymn is addressed to all, and is closer to Herbert and the medieval tradition, especially in its use of visual techniques. Herbert's work, as Rosemary Freeman has shown,281 was influenced by Emblem Books, and George Wither produced A Booke of Emblemes; Watts, too, would have been aware of the power of visual representations of the Crucifixion. In verse 3 of his hymn, this is made explicit: See from his Head, his Hands, his Feet, Sorrow and Love flow mingled down— and in verse 4 there is a vivid splash of colour: His dying crimson, like a Robe, Spreads o'er his body on the Tree— This kind of portrayal is not strictly emblematic, although the equation of blood with love and sorrow is not unlike the method of interpreting images in emblem books to make them into spiritual qualities; but it is close to the kind of meditative presentation of Ashrea (1665), where there is an illustration of Christ crucified, with scrolls representing the Beatitudes coming from his wounds. The commentary explores the connection: How can I view his dying Head humbly bowing down, with infinite patience, and not call to mind that, Blessed are the meek, . . . Now for as much as there is a secret sympathy and correspondence between the heart and the hand, who can elevate his eyes to Christ's right hand nail'd to the Cross, and not call to minde, that Blessed are the peacemakers;—

279

Louis Martz quotes from Luis de la Puente, and draws a parallel with Donne's Holy Sonnet II: ‘Then am I to set before mine eyes Christ Jesus crucified, beholding his heade crowned with thrones; his face spit upon; his eyes obscured; his armes disioincted; his tongue distasted with gall, and vinegar; his handes, and feete peerced with nailes; his backe, and shoulders torne with whippes; and his side opened with a launce: and then pondering that hee suffereth all this for my sinnes, I will drawe sundrye affections from the inwardest parte of my heart, . . . ’ (The Poetry of Meditation (New Haven and London, rev. edn., 1962), 49).

280

See Ch. 6, 121.

281

Rosemary Freeman, English Emblem Books (London, 1948), Ch. 6.

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Lastly, inasmuch as Persecution belongs to the Feet, either to fly, or stay and suffer, descend from thy Saviour's sacred hands, to his Feet, in like manner transfix'd with nails—282 I am not insisting that Watts borrowed from Ashrea, but that Ashrea represents something of an imaginative and visual tradition on which he was drawing. And as in the illustration from Ashrea the Beatitudes are scrolled from the wounds of Christ, so Watts shows ‘Love and Sorrow’ as flowing from them. Sorrow and Love flow, in a marvellous image, ‘mingled down’, trickling like blood and water over the body of Christ. The mingling seems intensely physical, but it is also characteristic of a certain kind of verbal play that is frequently found in devotional engraving (in broadsheets or books) where brackets are used to encourage multiple or alternative signification. The use of such brackets is found in many places, in William Barton's psalms and in George Herbert's anagram ARMY/MARY. I have not found a bracketed Love/Sorrow, but the possibility that Watts knew one should not be ruled out, and certainly he would have been familiar with the practice of bracketing. Imaginatively it enables him to hold in his mind the two qualities of love and sorrow, separate yet together, fused into one in the blood of the Saviour; and read, or sung, as differences held simultaneously in the mind, as two meanings in one.283 The text, however, is much more than a restatement of the believer at the foot of the cross. It is a very complex mixture of prohibition and permission—‘God forbid that I should glory, save. . . ’. The natural tendency to take pride—in anything—is to be set aside: there is no room for human glory, although the wording of the Epistle is a reminder that such glorying exists. St Paul prays to be forbidden such pride, because the only thing to be proud of is the Crucifixion. Watts repeats this formula of ‘forbid . . . save’ almost unaltered, except that by turning the original into Long Metre the two crucial words are now found at the opening of successive lines: Forbid it, Lord, that I should boast, Save in the death of Christ my God;— and by adding ‘my God’ he has inserted a reminder—as Herbert so often does in ‘The Sacrifice’—that the Christ who died is also God. It is the central paradox of Donne's preaching and of Herbert's poetry, and is found in Crossman's great hymn: Watts, characteristically, puts it into place without a flourish, but it indicates the way in which seventeenthcentury hermeneutical practice adds its own meaning to the text. Here it is vitally important, because it provides a double perspective through which love and

282

Ashrea (London, 1665), 54 ff.

283

I am grateful to Tessa Watt for directing my attention to bracketing.

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sorrow are to be seen. Watts's lines take the biblical text and restate the movement between self-knowledge and pride, the loss of self and the regaining of it, the loss of pride and the recapturing of it in a new sense. And they apply these ideas to the most mysterious and holy of all Christian practices, the sacrament of the Holy Communion. It is through the text itself that all the content—the visual elements, the application of the text to the Lord's Supper, the original development of it—is discovered. And it is in an examination of the lines and verses themselves, and their place in the structure of the hymn, that the integration of the various elements can be seen. Donald Davie, in a beautifully perceptive paragraph, linked what he called ‘Old Dissent’ with Calvinist art and ethics. In Calvinist worship, he noted, ‘everything breathes simplicity, sobriety, and measure’: The aesthetic and the moral perceptions have, built into them and near to the heart of them, the perception of licence, of abandonment, of superfluity, foreseen, even invited, and yet in the end denied, fended off. Art is measure, is exclusion; is therefore simplicity (hard-earned), is sobriety, tense with all the extravagances that it has been tempted by and has denied itself.284 Watts's Hymns and Spiritual Songs bears this out: ‘When I survey’, which is so rich with the events of the Crucifixion and the emotional response to it, is expressed in a language which is ‘tense’ with Watts's refusal to be dramatic like Crossman, witty like Herbert, or rapturous like Baxter. Watts's lines begin with a complex sentence, and continue with a controlled rhetoric. The adverbial clauses take up the first two lines: When I survey the wond'rous Cross On which the Prince of Glory dy'd,— The first edition had ‘Where the young Prince of Glory dy'd’, but for Watts's purposes that line was perhaps, too spectacular, too dramatic: the powerful effects are held back for later, and even then are effected by understatement. Even so, the ‘Prince of Glory’ (echoing Crossman's ‘the prince of life’) is a phrase which rings with royal effect: if God is the king, then Christ is the prince, the young heir (so that ‘young’ is superfluous). Then the ‘When’ of the adverbial opening, sustained over two lines, gives way in the second part of the verse to the main clause (in the manner of Tate and Brady): My richest Gain I count but Loss, And pour Contempt on all my Pride. These complex lines are managed and ordered in a graceful chiasmus—Gain–Loss–Contempt–Pride—the organization of these oppositions

284

Donald Davie, A Gathered Church (London, 1978), 25–6.

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reinforcing the sense of control and reflective action which is suggested by ‘When I survey’. The verbs prevent excitement, and encourage self-sacrifice and mortification: like some merchant who unaccountably prefers loss to gain, the speaker counts loss, and pours contempt. This mood is carried on at the opening of verse 2: Forbid it, Lord, that I should boast— The impact is indeed forbidding, severe, as Watts calls upon God to stop him doing something: and the mind has to follow the qualifications and negatives through, from ‘Forbid’ to ‘boast’ to ‘Save. . . ’, in a pattern which is forcefully emphasized by the Long Metre stanza. The movement is from human boasting to divine sacrifice, just as in the next couplet the movement is from human emotions and worldly things to the austerity of sacrifice and blood: All the vain things that charm me most, I sacrifice them to his Blood. The idea comes from the verse in Galatians (6: 14) which is quoted in the title: ‘But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world.’ St Paul's original metaphor is startling, and Watts fleshes it out, setting charm against blood. At this point the visual element of the first line's ‘Survey’ is isolated from the other meanings of that word, and echoed in ‘See’. The ‘See’ is dramatic, a voice from within the scene itself: See from his Head, his Hands, his Feet, Sorrow and Love flow mingled down! The details of head, hands, and feet encourage the expectation that from them will flow blood, but instead it is ‘Sorrow and Love’: the surprise is in the substitution of the emotional qualities for the physical ones. They are repeated, again using the figure of chiasmus: Sorrow and Love flow mingled down! Did e'er such Love and Sorrow meet— The mind has to attempt to reconcile the opposites, to understand their union, Sorrow and Love, Love and Sorrow, meeting on the Cross. The deliberate syntax in the dignified Long Metre line is Watts's device for controlling the immense emotional significance of the two things: here is love, selfless affection, giving rise to pain and sorrow, as the Saviour suffers for his love; here is sorrow (sadness, mourning, compassion) leading to love and suffering. ‘Sorrow’ is wonderfully rich in meaning and association: it is the sorrow of Lamentations 1: 12, traditionally prefiguring the Crucifixion:

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Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? Behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow— But if it is the sorrow of a suffering Saviour, in Watts's hymn it is also the compassion of a God, because it is linked with love. This is ‘the death of Christ my God’: the whole of Christian doctrine is found in the bracketing of sorrow and love, and in its re-bracketing in the next line. The different order is part of the rhetoric of the hymn, its control and precision, but it is also significant in terms of meaning—sorrow and its consequence, love; love, and its result, sorrow. If the two centre lines of this verse include a chiasmus, they are also rhetorically patterned in their enclosure by the two outer lines of the verse, both of which recall the physical punishments of the Crucifixion—head, hand, feet, the crown of thorns. The exclamation/question in line 4— Or Thorns compose so rich a Crown! although quite different from the Love—Sorrow exclamation in line 2, is nevertheless parallel to it in that it deals with a transformation: as sorrow and love are linked, so, more visually and dramatically, the crown of thorns (pain and sorrow) becomes rich through love. The crown of pain ‘composes’ the richest crown ever (the ‘Did e'er’ of line 3 is still governing line 4) and that word ‘compose’ is an extraordinary one: it means, of course, to ‘com-pose’ to put together, to make up something, to constitute it; but it also carries the sense of ordering, shaping, the activity of a mind in composition—and perhaps of a mind that is itself composed, at peace with itself and the world. The juxtapositions are startling, for ‘Thorns compose’, as though the thorns themselves composedly made up the crown of pain. Watts carefully leaves his questions unanswered, because any answer would require a whole history of the Fall and the Redemption (the reader, or reading community, would supply this). Instead he turns back to the emblem of Christ on the Cross with an unexpected splash of colour: His dying Crimson like a Robe Spreads o'er his Body on the Tree,— The vocabulary is startling because of the apparent monochrome of the other verses, but it is also astonishing in its apparent remoteness from the actual subject: Christ's blood is now ‘his dying Crimson’, and the Cross is ‘the Tree’, as though the poet were deliberately distancing himself and us, not only from the usual words, but also from the immediacy of the event. It is now something which he wants to talk about by using colours and wood, not blood and Cross. And then the crimson is like a robe: almost, it seems for a moment, comforting, until we remember that it is blood on a body. Watts's language insists that the reader should make such recollections

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across the simile, and should translate ‘crimson’ and ‘tree’ into blood and Cross. This is followed by a sudden turn, with ‘Then. . . ’— Then am I dead to all the Globe, And all the Globe is dead to me. The chiasmus in the syntax, which has been a distinguishing feature throughout, is here most obviously and beautifully displayed. It is part of the strict rhetorical control which is exercised throughout: at this point Watts is talking about his own death to the world, matching the death on the Cross—‘The Prince of Glory dy'd’—to ‘Then am I dead’. From the vision of the globe, the total world seen as it were from outside, Watts turns to the total world seen from the point of view of a person living in it, conscious of ‘the whole realm of Nature’: Were the whole realm of Nature mine, That were a Present far too small; Love so amazing, so divine Demands my Soul, my Life, my All. The transition from a contemplation of the crucified Christ, to death to the world, and now to the demands which this makes upon the self, is managed with consummate skill. The vocabulary continues to be controlled, unemotional: a word such as ‘Present’ is so simple that it almost becomes bathos (and it has been altered by many hymn-books to the more churchy ‘offering’). But ‘Present’ is part of the hymn's register, the deliberate refusal to give way to high emotional impulses, the grave and serious employment of simple language. Watts uses such language to understate, because he is aware of the immensity of the event and its demands: the final verse is dealing, in the same controlled manner as the earlier verses, with sacrifices, divine and human. It begins with ‘the whole realm of Nature’ and ends with the word ‘All’, the word towards which the final verse leads inexorably and rightly. Amazing and divine love has its demands, and they are total. In its way this is an interpretation of the fourth verse, in which the voice is dead to the globe; but it is also a concluding response to the initial ‘When I survey’. That survey has involved a sight (and a consideration) of Christ on the Cross, his head, his hands, his feet; it has also involved a response, counting the richest gain as loss; but at the end Watts completes the hymn by invoking the unrepeatable ‘All’, the conclusion to which everything is leading, the final word of totality. The hymn is thus a profound meditation, conscious of the amazing love shown in the Crucifixion and conscious of the total demand which this makes on the human being: but it eschews the dramatic and the emotional in favour of something finer, the controlled and reflective ordering of thought and passion. In this, the rhetoric of the hymn is allimportant: it

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is the way in which the lines are so meticulously constructed, in which the patterns of chiasmus so artfully organize the thought, that directs the interpretation. It is through the chiasmus figure that Watts so skilfully directs the attention to the interaction between the internal mind and the external world, in which the globe is dead to me, and I unto the world. It is a most skilful adaptation of St Paul, who often uses the phrase ‘dead to sin’: here the singer is dead, not to sin, but to the world. And yet he can go on singing: like a tragic hero, he has a statement to make before he dies. In his death, he has found a life, consisting of simplicity and surrender. For in one sense ‘When I survey’ transcends all its hymnological influences and comes closer to pre-Reformation devotion; it is Watts's uncompromising recognition of the total demands of the situation—‘my Soul, my Life, my All’—that prevents the hymn from being too calm, from being a rhetorical exercise; if only because it is opposed, as all Watts's hymnody is, to the rational and ethical. In encountering ‘When I survey the wond'rous cross’, the reader/singer has, for a moment, the heady experience of being a mystic.

8 After Watts To Thee, my God, my days are known; My soul enjoys the thought. (Philip Doddridge, Hymns (1755), XXXVIII)

Joseph Addison Addison is known as an essayist, moralist, and the writer of a few hymns, printed in the Spectator, the periodical essays which Addison and Steele wrote between 1711 and 1714. These agreeable and popular short pieces, written for a new middle-class reading public, were concerned with many subjects, including religion and human conduct. The hymns were intimately related to the ideas that preceded them, and expressed Addison's firm and optimistic belief. ‘Man’, he writes in the Spectator, 441, ‘considered in himself, is a very helpless and a very wretched being.’ But Divine Providence and care are always present: ‘we are under the care of One who directs contingencies, and has in his hands the management of everything that is capable of annoying or offending us’: In short, the person who has a firm trust in the Supreme Being, is powerful in his power, wise by his wisdom, happy by his happiness. He reaps the benefit of every Divine attribute, and loses his own insufficiency in the fulness of infinite perfection. Life would, in every respect, be much worse without God, and without the hope of immortality. Addison was oversimplifying, for the benefit of his readers, and within the constraints of the periodical essay; but his ideas reflected the Latitudinarian temper of the time.285 Religion alleviates our wretched human existence, and life would be much worse without it; this is what Addison believed, and counselled, and it is this which gives his hymns their particular character. His chief religious virtues were trust, duty and gratitude, and he distrusted zealots. But he was not complacent, and

285

‘A trust in the assistance of an almighty Being, naturally produces patience, hope, cheerfulness, and all other dispositions of the mind that alleviate those calamities we are not able to remove’ (the Spectator, 441).

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(as Edward and Lillian Bloom have shown286) was aware of the shortcomings of such Latitudinarian virtues as prudence, and made angry by wastefulness and idleness. He disliked extravagance, and the excessive accumulation of wealth; he believed in the good mercantilist society, based on work and the sensible use of money, and was angry when he saw his ideals abused. In religion (as the Blooms have pointed out), ‘he was no sentimentalist’;287 but he also disliked religious gloom, and argued that the true spirit of religion cheers, as well as composes the soul; it banishes, indeed, all levity of behaviour, all vicious and dissolute mirth, but in exchange fills the mind with a perpetual serenity, uninterrupted cheerfulness, and an habitual inclination to please others, as well as to be pleased in itself. (Spectator, 494) It is this balance which is found in his hymns, the balance between an awareness of the wretchedness of the world and a sense of religious happiness. It is found, for example, in his treatment of the twenty-third psalm (Spectator, 441). He describes that psalm as one in which ‘David has very beautifully represented this steady reliance on God Almighty’. It is that word ‘steady’ which is unusual, and denotes the particular character of the hymn: The Lord my pasture shall prepare, And feed me with a shepherd's care: His presence shall my wants supply, And guard me with a watchful eye; My noon-day walks he shall attend, And all my midnight hours defend. The rhythms are skilfully maintained in the succession of iambic couplets: the rhymes produce a sense of regularity, as each thought is completed in the two-line unit. Each evenly-paced line has its two-syllabled words, with ‘pasture’ prominent in line I: Addison has reversed the order of the psalm (‘The Lord is my shepherd . . . He maketh me to lie down in green pastures’) and the result is a sense of reordering of the original. It is a rearrangement of the psalm in decorous octosyllabic couplets, which fit the gentle propriety of ‘My noon-day walks’. This was presumably intended metonymically, complementing ‘midnight hours’, but it also suggests a late morning stroll by a gentleman of leisure, in the company of the Lord-shepherd. The reassurance of ‘defend’ in the last line is continued in verse 2. Although it describes someone hot and weary, the long sentence conducts the reader gently away from the sultry glebe and the thirsty mountain: When in the sultry glebe I faint, Or on the thirsty mountain pant;

286

Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom, Joseph Addison's Sociable Animal (Providence, RI, 1971), ch. 1.

287

Ibid. 163.

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To fertile vales and dewy meads My weary wandering steps he leads, Where peaceful rivers, soft and slow, Amid the verdant landscape flow. Addison lived in an age before the beauty of mountains was widely appreciated, and before hill-walking was a pastime: here he sees a mountain as a place which is devoid of water, and his expansion of ‘He leadeth me beside the still waters’ is another reordering of scripture in an eighteenth-century mode. Each of the three verses, 2, 3, 4, provides comfort by the same kind of movement: When in the sultry glebe I faint, Or on the thirsty mountain pant;— Though in the paths of death I tread, With gloomy horrors over-spread;— Though in a bare and rugged way, Through devious lonely wilds I stray,— The openings, ‘When’, ‘Though’, encourage the reader to continue until the landscape ‘improves’: in every case the help comes, the prospect changes, and the wilderness smiles (borrowed from Isaiah 35): The barren wilderness shall smile With sudden greens and herbage crowned, And streams shall murmur all around. The last verse is unusual in that it changes the pattern of 3 × 2, and for the first time allows the sense to work against the rhyme in a 2 × 3 pattern, breaking the stanza at ‘beguile’; but the reassurance has already begun immediately after the first couplet, with the powerful ‘Thy bounty’ (Addison's rendering of verses 5 and 6 of the psalm). The version is of considerable interest, not only because of its technical skill—the movement of the lines, the rhymes, the pace of the verses—which is regular but also gently varied—but because of its hermeneutics, its interpretation of the Old Testament psalm in the mode of eighteenth-century landscape taste. Heaven is a landscape by Claude Lorrain (or the river walks of Magdalen, Addison's Oxford college), green and fertile, with peaceful rivers and murmuring streams. These are found, of course, in the original; but Addison develops them, and he does so in a way which deliberately turns its back on the sublime. The emotion of ‘The Lord my pasture shall prepare’ is one of ‘steady reliance’, and it is associated with gratitude, which is the subject of the Spectator, 453. This begins ‘There is not a more pleasing exercise of the mind than gratitude’, and ends with

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When all thy mercies, O my God, My rising soul surveys; Transported with the view, I'm lost In wonder, love, and praise:— Once again the metaphor is one of landscape. The soul rises to an eminence (Sir Thomas Browne called it an ‘O altitudo’), and surveys the scene of God's Providence, spread before it in a view. In the Spectator, 412, Addison described a view in his catalogue of ‘those pleasures of the imagination’ which depend upon ‘the actual view and survey of outward objects’: Such are the prospects of an open champaign country, a vast uncultivated desert, of huge heaps of mountains, high rocks and precipices, or a wide expanse of waters . . . We are flung into a pleasing astonishment at such unbounded views, and feel a delightful stillness and amazement in the soul at the apprehension of them. He uses the same metaphor as in the poem, that of losing oneself: a spacious horizon is an image of liberty, where the eye has room to range abroad, to expatiate at large on the immensity of its views, and to lose itself amidst the variety of objects that offer themselves to its observation. Addison's hymn reflects this physic-theology: it also modifies the tradition of a ‘prospect poem’, of the kind found in Sir John Dedham ‘Cooper's Hill’ (1642). At the summit the poet is ‘lost/In wonder’, and lost for words as well: O how shall words with equal warmth The gratitude declare, That glows within my ravished heart! But thou canst read it there. God can read the heart, if not the poem: and yet, of course, the poem is there to be read by him, and is addressed to him. He is now in the second person singular (as opposed to the third person of ‘The Lord my pasture . . . ’), and the direct address makes a distinct difference to the character of the verse. Addison stresses the divine care when he was a baby (verses 3 and 4), an infant— Before my infant heart conceived From whom those comforts flowed— and a youth: When in the slippery paths of youth With heedless steps I ran, Thine arm unseen conveyed me safe And led me up to man;— He perceives human life as a journey upwards from childhood to manhood, from ignorance of God (who is ‘unseen’) to a full consciousness of his

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providence. It is the opposite of the intuitive process described by Vaughan and Traherne (and later by Wordsworth) in which the child has glimpses of heaven that are denied to the adult; Addison sees the full perception of God as belonging not to infancy but to maturity, not to intuition but to reason. In the development of the person from infancy, through childhood and youth to adulthood, God has ‘provided’, seen before, and also ‘provided’, made provision: Addison uses the metaphor of the store of gifts, and changes the image of the cup (again from Psalm 23) to that of the parable of the talents. It is a poem for a mercantile age, for responsible adults, and for Addison's prudent middle-class readers: Thy bounteous hand with wordly bliss Has made my cup run o'er, And in a kind and faithful friend Has doubled all my store. Ten thousand thousand precious gifts My daily thanks employ, Nor is the least a cheerful heart That tastes those gifts with joy. Addison is well aware of his good fortune, which he accepts with a good grace. God's arm conveyed him safe when he was a youth, and now Through hidden dangers, toils, and deaths, It gently cleared my way, And through the pleasing snares of vice, More to be feared than they. He attributes to God the fact that he has escaped from dangers and toils (presumably spiritual as well as physical), but also that he has escaped from vice: any virtues that he has are to be attributed to the providence of God. It is done, we notice, ‘gently’: and the Common Metre stanzas reinforce the idea by allowing the mind to move gently through the four lines. Addison does not often, like Doddridge, use the stanza to create parallels: he is more inclined to use adverbial clauses, and to carry the movement of thought in one sentence from line 1 to line 4: Through all eternity to thee A joyful song I'll raise, For oh! eternity's too short To utter all thy praise. The last adverbial clause is not original (it is found in George Herbert's ‘King of Glorie, King of Peace’); but, as the Blooms have written, it was not the purpose of the Spectator to be original. It is better seen as representative of the culture of the time, reasonable, benevolent, and scientific.

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This is nowhere better seen than in the lofty and grave Spectator, 465, in which Addison describes the stars and the sky, drawing on the images of Newtonian cosmology, and its ideas of a creative power which held the universe in a state of motion and equilibrium: The spacious firmament on high, With all the blue ethereal sky, And spangled heavens, a shining frame, Their great Original proclaim:— The diction is measured and noble, with three-syllabled words such as ‘firmament’ and ‘ethereal’, leading towards the four-syllabled ‘Original’. The adjectives are also important—‘spacious’, ‘spangled’, ‘shining’—and in each half of the verse the lines conduct the thought towards the important source of all—‘Their great Original’ in the first half of the verse, and ‘an Almighty hand’ in the second half: The unwearied sun from day to day Does his Creator's power display, And publishes to every land The work of an Almighty hand. In the essay which precedes this, Addison recommends a number of methods of strengthening faith, the last of which is ‘frequent retirement from the world, accompanied with religious meditation’. This allows freedom from the distractions of the world, and ‘in our retirement everything disposes us to be serious’ (using ‘serious’ in its eighteenthcentury sense of being serious about religion). Although the works of Nature everywhere sufficiently evidenced a Deity, Addison remembers, with admirable good sense, that people are often too busy to notice. As a sign of this, verse 2 of his hymn deals with the night sky, and its beauty is best seen away from the glare of city lights: Soon as the evening shades prevail, The moon takes up the wondrous tale, And nightly to the listening earth Repeats the story of her birth: Whilst all the stars that round her burn, And all the planets in their turn, Confirm the tidings as they roll, And spread the truth from pole to pole. The division into the moon and the stars (from Psalm 8: 3) is gracefully articulated in terms of a story-teller with an attendant chorus. Every night the same tale is told and confirmed to ‘the listening earth’—not the indifferent earth. In ‘from pole to pole’, Addison imaginatively steps outside the world to see it spinning through space.

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The hymn is a test, therefore, of the imagination's ability to describe the greatness of the Creator through the immensity of his creation. Addison chooses to do so in terms of cosmic harmony: What though, in solemn silence, all Move round the dark terrestrial ball? What though nor real voice nor sound Amid their radiant orbs be found? He is drawing here upon Psalm 19, ‘There is no speech or language, where their voice is not heard’, and altering it for his own purposes. The stars are (to human ears) silent, with neither ‘real voice nor sound’; but the repeated ‘What though’ looks forward to the answer: In reason's ear they all rejoice, And utter forth a glorious voice, For ever singing, as they shine, ‘The hand that made us is Divine’. The sentiment is similar to that in Spectator, 565, where Addison quotes Newton: ‘the noblest and most exalted way of considering this infinite space, is that of Sir Isaac Newton, who calls it the sensorium of the Godhead’. The sensorium was Newton's way in the Opticks of avoiding the use of controversial words such as ‘mind’ and ‘brain’: in Addison's popularization of Newton,288 it was a way of describing a way in which ‘infinite space gives room to infinite knowledge’; and, in the consideration of God's Omnipresence and Omniscience, ‘every uncomfortable thought vanishes’. The imagination may be stretched, but it stretches towards the comfort of God, and reconciles his whole being in one movement. ‘In reacting to the sublimity of nature’, writes David B. Morris, ‘Addison discovers imaginative support for his rational belief concerning the existence and nature of God: his experience concurs with his reason.’289 In this fusion, Addison describes the circling planets as a choir, making a sound that is heard in reason's ear: it is not a ‘real sound’, but a kind of perceived harmony, a rejoicing in God that is apprehended by the (metaphorical) ear. The planets, unheard by us, sing in the kind of harmony which we shall experience in heaven.290 It is this vision of the world and of the world to come that Addison sees and celebrates. For him it is reason that suggests a beneficent Creator and a wonderful creation, in which he is a ‘blest servant’, as the ‘divine ode’ in Spectator, 489 suggests:

288

See Marjorie Hope Nicholson, Newton Demands the Muse (Princeton, 1946), 105.

289

David B. Morris, The Religious Sublime (Lexington, Ky., 1972), 136.

290

Compare the Spectator, 580: ‘There is nothing which more ravishes and transports the soul, than harmony; and we have great reason to believe, from the descriptions of this place in Holy Scripture, that this is one of the entertainments of it.’

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How are thy servants blest, O Lord! How sure is their defence! Eternal wisdom is their guide, Their help Omnipotence. Recalling his experiences in foreign travels, he rejoices that he has survived ‘burning climes’ and ‘tainted air’; and God's benevolence is seen, not—of coursein the evils that exist, but in the fact that these things are not worse: Thy mercy sweetened every soil Made every region please; The hoary Alpine hills it warmed, And smoothed the Tyrrhene seas. When the seas are not smooth, the providence of God, which raised the storm, also calms it: In midst of dangers, fears, and death, Thy goodness I'll adore, And praise thee for thy mercies past; And humbly hope for more. This last line, which was later used by Charles Wesley, is part of the Addisonian posture of gratitude and hope: his hymns are close to the General Thanksgiving in their celebration of creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life; and as such they were very popular in the eighteenth century, appearing in collections by John Wesley, Toplady, Madan, and others. They are the graceful expressions of a man who counts his blessings, and in this hymnody of thankfulness they have never been bettered. This is because Addison found Newtonian physic-theology so congenial, and Augustan versification so natural, that the two joined to produce verse that is assured and correct, elegantly suited to the dignity of his belief. And beyond this world, with its blessings, he looks to ‘distant worlds’, where there are scenes ‘infinitely more great and glorious than we are able to imagine’; and in the expression of these things, his hymnody becomes no longer Augustan and Latitudinarian, but truly imaginative.291 He transcends the limitations of his time, although he is inevitably conditioned by it, as James Montgomery noticed. He described Addison's hymns as ‘very pleasing’, but in a typically sharp comment added ‘it is only to be regretted that they are not more in number, and that the God of Grace, as well as the God of Providence, is not more distinctly recognized in them’.292 He was writing a century after Addison, from a very different perspective:

291

For Addison and the imagination, see Ernest Lee Tuveson, The Imagination as a Means of Grace (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1960), 92 ff.

292

James Montgomery, The Christian Psalmist (Glasgow, 1825), p. xxv.

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Addison's world had been turned upside down by the challenging events of the eighteenth century, culminating in the French Revolution. But it is a measure of the skill of Addison's hymns that they have survived such extraordinary cultural changes, to become standard expressions of thanks to the benevolent Deity.

Philip Doddridge In April 1731, Philip Doddridge described the effect of singing one of Isaac Watts's hymns, ‘Give me the wings of faith to rise’, on his congregation at Northampton: We sang one of your hymns . . . and in that part of the worship I had the satisfaction to observe tears in the eyes of several of the people; and after the service was over some of them told me they were not able to sing, so deeply were their minds affected.293 This is a reminder of how close Doddridge was to Watts; but it also points towards a feature of his own work, his awareness of the emotional power of hymns, and their ability to move a congregation. James Montgomery speaks of ‘the piety of Watts, the ardour of Wesley, and the tenderness of Doddridge’,294 and those adjectives will do as well as any to identify (in one word) the distinctive qualities of the three. Certainly Doddridge has a gentleness which is not found, except occasionally, in the other two; it is explicit in the first lines of his well-known hymn for infant baptism: See Israel's gentle Shepherd stands With all-engaging Charms; Hark how he calls the tender Lambs And folds them in his Arms! The shepherd is gentle, the lambs are tender: the two adjectives complement one another, and meet one another across the line units, the one gentle shepherd meeting the tender lambs, the one adjective supplementing the other, folded into the other as the lambs are folded into the shepherd's arms. ‘Folds’ is a most effective word, with its sense of a physical coming together; and everything in the verse is part of the enfolding process, as the spectator sees (‘See Israel's gentle Shepherd . . . ’) the gathering of lambs into the shepherd's arms. It is all very charming: ‘Charms’ itself is, of course, an important word in the production of this effect—meaning not witchcraft but attractiveness. It is a dangerous word to use, verging on the

293

Quoted in C. J. Abbey and John H. Overton, The English Church in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1878), ii. 276.

294

Montgomery, The Christian Psalmist, p. xii.

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sentimental, but it is supported by everything else in the verse, and particularly by ‘all-engaging’. This seems like a tautology, but actually adds to the emotional force of the picture which this verse presents, and helps to define the ‘Charms’ as benign. Doddridge may have taken the phrase from the essays which George Berkeley wrote in the Guardian in 1713. Essay VI, on ‘Future Rewards and Punishments’, contains a section which would have appealed to Doddridge: Virtue has in herself the most engaging charms; and Christianity, as it places her in the strongest light, and adorned with all her native attractions, so it kindles a new fire in the soul, by adding to them the unutterable rewards which attend her votaries in an eternal state.295 Berkeley's Guardian essays were a sustained attack upon Anthony Collins's A Discourse of Free-Thinking, which had appeared in 1713, and caused a stir by its attempt to enlist such figures as Archbishop Tillotson in the ranks of the freethinkers. Indeed, the word ‘charming’ occurs again in Collins's description of Tillotson (which is without irony): ‘What a charming idea does he give us of the Deity; it is alone sufficient, without any further Argument, to make the Atheist wish there were a Deity.’296 Berkeley's attack on Collins was directed against his scepticism. The freethinkers, said Berkeley, hoped to convince mankind ‘that there is no such thing as a wise and just Providence’.297 This Guardian essay is entitled ‘Happiness obstructed by Free-Thinkers’, and Berkeley's Christianity is consistently hopeful of happiness and pleasure. One essay, ‘Pleasures, Natural and Fantastical’, contains a passage which might serve as a description of Doddridge's religious temper, as found in his hymns: But the pleasure which naturally affects a human mind with the most lively and transporting touches, I take to be the sense that we act in the eye of infinite wisdom, power, and goodness, that will crown our virtuous endeavours here with a happiness hereafter, large as our desires, and lasting as our immortal souls. This is a perpetual spring of gladness in the mind.298 This beautiful paragraph is one which provides a glimpse of the underlying philosophy of religious belief as a source of deep and serene happiness. As Isaac Watts had written: Religion never was design'd To make our pleasures less.

295

The Works of George Berkeley, ed. A. C. Fraser (London, 1901), iv. 159.

296

Anthony Collins, A Discourse of Free-Thinking (London, 1713), 172.

297

Berkeley, Works, iv. 178.

298

Ibid. iv. 158.

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This is the opposite of an enthusiastic religion, and Doddridge explicitly rejects the prophetic role: I ask not Enoch's rapt'rous Flight To realms of heav'nly Day: Nor seek Elijah's fiery Steeds To bear this Flesh away. It is in this context that we must see Doddridge's invocation of the gentle shepherd, with his all-engaging charms. The verse signifies the gentleness not only in the adjectives, and the attributes of the shepherd, but in the three verbs, which enact the progression of love in a well-ordered sequence. He stands . . . calls . . . and folds them in his arms. It is at this point, with his arms full of lambs, that the shepherd speaks, paraphrasing the gospel verse which is quoted at the top of the hymn, Mark 10: 14: ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not; for of such is the kingdom of God.’ Doddridge's verse is a reminder of the Incarnation, and of the greatness which was surrendered (as in Philippians 2) in a further supreme act of gentleness: ‘Permit them to approach, (he cries) ‘Nor scorn their humble Name; ‘For ’twas to bless such Souls as these, ‘The Lord of Angels came.’ Although the first verse is pictorial and the second verse dramatic, both are governed by the important word ‘See’ at the beginning of verse 1: the whole is an emblematic presentation of the Shepherd-Saviour, folding the lamb-children in his arms. The contemplation of this lovely scene is succeeded by the response: We bring them, Lord, in thankful Hands, And yield them up to Thee; Joyful, that we ourselves are Thine, Thine let our Offspring be. The response gives back the sound, to encourage the sense of sympathetic harmony: See Israel's gentle Shepherd stands— We bring them, Lord, in thankful Hands— And folds them— And yield them— and the delicate chiasmus of the last two lines provides a rhetorically satisfying conclusion to this emblem-response part of the hymn (in the original text, there are two more verses). The three verses have a refined and pleasing interchange of presentation and response, and because they

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are not dramatic, like Wesley, or majestic, like Watts, it is easy to underestimate them.299 The title of his book, published in 1755, four years after Doddridge's death by his friend Job Orton, was Hymns founded on various texts in the Holy Scriptures, by the late Reverend Philip Doddridge, D.D., published from the author's manuscript. In following it through from beginning to end, the reader is conscious of passing in succession from one book of the Bible to the next, from the Old Testament to the New, and also of the inevitable differences of composition. As Orton said in the Preface, ‘The Nature of the Subjects will easily account for the Difference of Composure, why some are more plain and artless, others more lively, sublime, and full of poetick Fire. . . . ’300 The hymns were also closely linked to biblical texts because Doddridge used them in connection with his preaching. He addresses the hymn-singer from the pulpit: Hark the glad sound! the Saviour comes, The Saviour promised long! Let ev'ry Heart prepare a Throne And ev'ry Voice a Song. The imperatives are simple and common—‘Hark . . . prepare . . . ’—but they are nevertheless commands to a congregation. The same feature is found in hymn CXCIV in Orton's collection, ‘The Angel's Reply to the Women, that sought Christ. Matt. xxviii. 5, 6’, with ‘Chase’ and ‘bow’: Ye humble Souls, that seek the Lord, Chase all your Fears away; And bow with Pleasure down to see The Place where Jesus lay. As with ‘Charms’ in the baptismal hymn, the word ‘Pleasure’ reveals the Berkeleyan hermeneutics: the resurrection has become a source of the kind of serenity which is found in the Guardian essays. It has nothing to do with hedonism or an easy gratification; but the contrast between pleasure and pain is a structuring principle of the hymn, opposing the misery of Good Friday to the joy of Easter Day, when the angel spoke to the women—

299

An unnamed nineteenth-century writer did just that: ‘A remarkable evenness appears in Doddridge's compositions. They do not present much to provoke or invite criticism. Their faults are not such as to call for severe censure, nor their excellences such as to extort rapturous praise. In reading his works, we are not detained either by glowing imperfections or by glowing beauties, but we glide on quietly, pleased in a high degree by the calm loveliness of the whole prospect.’ This kind of complacent oversimplification does no service to Doddridge; his writings are much more interesting than this suggests, because he gives very distinctive and attractive readings to the passages of scripture on which his hymns are founded.

300

Hymns founded on various texts in the Holy Scriptures, by the late Reverend Philip Doddridge, D.D., published from the author's manuscript by Job Orton (Salop, 1755), p. v.

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‘Come, see the place where the Lord lay’. Doddridge vividly imagines them having to stoop down to see right into the cave, and transposes that action into a metaphor: humble souls who seek the Lord must bow down to see the central place in the story. Doddridge's preaching style is well exemplified in this hymn. He was described by Watts as ‘a most affectionate preacher’ (one whose discourse touched the affections),301 and he portrays the dead Christ in a way that is calculated to stir the emotions: Thus low the Lord of Life was brought; Such Wonders Love can do; Thus cold in Death that Bosom lay, Which throbb'd and bled for you. Here words such as ‘Bosom’ (stressing the maternal and comforting) and ‘throbb'd’ (suggesting compassion and pity) contrast with ‘low’, ‘cold’, and ‘bled’, while the ‘for you’ is clearly designed to affect the listeners. They are exhorted to weep, and in their weeping to wash the body of Christ, in a striking adaptation of Roman Catholic imagery: A Moment give a Loose to Grief, Let grateful Sorrows rise, And wash the bloody Stains away With Torrents from your Eyes. Doddridge, as we have seen, regarded tears as important evidence of religious feeling. But on Easter Day the same eyes are to be raised: Then raise your Eyes, and tune your Songs, The Saviour lives again; Not all the Bolts and Bars of Death The Conqu'ror could detain. Doddridge encourages, exhorts, expounds; he stands in the Dissenting tradition which valued the sermon as a means of grace.302 But, in common with many of the less extreme Dissenters, he also valued the Sacraments. Neglect of the Holy Communion is the subject of a dramatic Long Metre hymn, CLXXI in Job Orton's collection, ‘God's Name profan'd, when his Table is treated with Contempt. Malachi i. 12.’ It works by questions and exclamations: My God, and is thy Table spread? And does thy Cup with Love o'er flow? Thither be all thy Children led And let them all its Sweetness know.

301

The Works of the Rev. Philip Doddridge, D.D. (Leeds, 1802), i. 96.

302

See Horton Davies, Worship and Theology in England from Watts and Wesley to Maurice, 1690–1850 (London and Princeton, 1961), 31.

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Hail sacred feast, which Jesus makes! Rich Banquet of his Flesh and blood! Thrice happy he, who here partakes That sacred Stream, that heav'nly Food! Doddridge is not addressing a congregation, as he is in most of his hymns (‘Ye Servants of the Lord . . . ’); he is addressing God, and the Sacrament itself, where the presence of God in Jesus Christ is found. But the discourse between the speaker and God is meant to be overheard, as in a drama, and in verse 3 he turns back to his people: Why are its Dainties all in vain Before unwilling Hearts display'd? Was not for you the Victim slain? Are you forbid the Children's Bread? The verse begins with the indirect ‘unwilling Hearts’, but changes to ‘you’, repeated for emphasis. Also emphatic is ‘Dainties’, one of those revealing words (like ‘Charms’ and ‘Pleasure’) which Doddridge uses. It had been so used by Joseph Stennett: both writers emphasize the tempting delights of the Holy Communion, which increases the wonder at the unwilling hearts who ignore such things. A similar word, ‘Bounties’ occurs in ‘Jesus, my Lord, how rich thy Grace!’, and Doddridge's hymns are full of words that suggest abundance and happiness: O happy Day, that fixed my Choice On Thee, my Saviour and my God! Well may this glowing Heart rejoice, And tell its Raptures all abroad. His description of the soul in pilgrimage is of a joyful journey, far removed from the usual conception of human life as involving a barren land and the hill difficulty: Now let our Voices join, To form one pleasant Song: Ye Pilgrims in Jehovah's Ways, With Musick pass along. How streight the Path appears, How open, and how fair! No lurking Gins t'entrap our Feet; No fierce destroyer there. But Flow'rs of Paradise In rich Profusion spring; The Sun of Glory gilds the Path, And dear companions sing. Doddridge's plan is to encourage his singers through enjoyment, and through the prospect of what is to come:

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See Salem's golden Spires In beauteous Prospect rise; And brighter Crowns than Mortals wear Which sparkle thro' the Skies.— This kind of pleasure must be one reason why Doddridge seems so accessible, gentle, and friendly: ‘He is the wayfarer's friend’, wrote Erik Routley.303 His hymnody has the Puritan seriousness of Bunyan's soul in pilgrimage, but it also explores the Berkeleyan pleasures of religion. From Watts he picks up words such as ‘chearful’: Now let our chearful Eyes survey Our great High-Priest above, And celebrate his constant Care, And sympathetic Love. He can be severe, but he is more likely to be gentle to the tender soul, reassuring about the continuity of God's love: O God of Jacob, by whose Hand Thine Israel still is fed, Who thro' this weary Pilgrimage Hast all our Fathers led: To thee our humble Vows we raise, To thee address our Prayer, And in thy kind and faithful Breast Deposite all our Care. Job Orton, when he first published Doddridge's hymns, was surprisingly defensive about them. They were, he said, ‘composed during a Series of many Years, amidst an uncommon Variety and daily Succession of most important Labours, by a Man who had no Ear for Musick’.304 This implied criticism is not easy to understand. Doddridge's hymns are not unmusical in the sense that the rhythms and sounds are harsh or uncomfortable to the ear: he uses parallelism well, to suit the Common Metre Let ev'ry Heart prepare a Throne, And ev'ry Voice a Song— and his variations on the rhythm are often felicitous, as in Joyful that we ourselves are Thine. Doddridge, like Baxter and Watts, uses the traditional 148th Psalm metre with assurance and power. His hymn on ‘The compleating of the spiritual Temple. Zech. iv. 7.’ uses the building metaphor solidly and impressively,

303

Erik Routley, ‘The Hymns of Philip Doddridge’, in Geoffrey F. Nuttall (ed.), Philip Doddridge, 1702–51, His Contributions to English Religion (London, 1951).

304

Hymns founded on various texts in the Holy Scriptures, p. x.

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in two great blocks. These are two complete sentences, fitting the two halves of the verse: Sing to the Lord above, Who deigns on Earth to raise A Temple to his Love, A Monument of Praise. Ye Saints around, Thro' all its Frame, Its Builder's Name Harmonious sound. The next verse carries the idea much further, showing God as the architect and planner, who also laid the foundations (from Zechariah 4: 9). So far the idea is traditional, but Doddridge then goes on to insert a New Testament reading of Zechariah's temple, ending with a metaphor from building that is spectacularly witty and surprising: He form'd the glorious Plan, And its Foundation laid, That God might dwell with Man, And Mercy be display'd; His Son he sent, Who, great and good, Made his own Blood The sweet Cement. Although this is unexpected, it is remarkably effective: God is the planner and architect of the spiritual temple, and Christ's blood is what holds it together. We can see the tension here within the metaphor: it is hard to imagine blood as cement, or to think of cement as sweet; but it congeals and dries hard, and yet the idea behind the comparison, and the idea of ‘sweet Cement’ are full of force in terms of doctrine.305 Doddridge's hymns often contain words that enliven in this way. A single word will light up a whole stanza, as in ‘Gratitude the Spring of true Religion. Hosea xi. 4.’, with the word ‘silken’: My God, what silken Cords are thine! How soft, and yet how strong! While Pow'r and Truth and Love combine To draw our Souls along. The original text has ‘I drew them with cords of a man, with bonds of Love’, but the addition of ‘silken’ is an increase of sound and sense, as well

305

The image of cement occurs in Robert Blair's popular poem The Grave (1743). A letter from Blair to Doddridge, enclosing a copy of The Grave, is in Thomas Stedman (ed.), Letters to and from the Rev. Philip Doddridge, D.D. (London, 1790). Line 88 of The Grave is ‘Friendship! mysterious cement of the soul!’.

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as suggesting a kind of mystery, as souls are drawn along by something as delicate as silken cords. At the other extreme in force of sound and robustness of sense is a three-syllabled word such as ‘Magazines’ (store-houses) in ‘God's Controversy by Fire. Amos.iv. 11. On Occasion of a dreadful Fire’: Eternal God, our humbled Souls Before thy Presence bow: With all thy Magazines of Wrath How terrible art Thou! Another example of words which enliven Doddridge's verses is ‘Cordial’ (a medicine which—appropriately—invigorates the heart) in hymn CCLIX, ‘The Love of God shed abroad in the Heart by the Spirit. Rom. v. 5.’: Thy Love, my God, appears, And brings Salvation down, My Cordial thro' this Vale of tears, In Paradise my Crown. The word is precise here, picking up the reference to the heart in the original text from Romans 5. It is perhaps not surprising to find that Doddridge was an admirer of Racine, in whose work he found the same exactitude, and the force which comes from the ability to find precisely the right word or phrase to describe powerful emotion. But the virtues of Racine's style which he picks out might be said to be his also, though on a smaller scale. His clarity, elegance, and simplicity are often enlivened by a word which is neoclassical in its precision. An example is ‘trifle’ in verse 2 of hymn CCXXIII, ‘The Paralytick at Bethesda. John v. 6.’: And will ye hear his gracious Voice, While sore diseas'd ye lie? Or will ye all his Grace despise, And trifle till ye die? The word twists the original story neatly: human souls are diseased, and—unlike the cripples at the pool of Bethesda—do not wish to be cured. The opposite of this, found in the next verse, is a word that Doddridge was very fond of, energy: not the energy of a vigorous human being—though he lived his life at a furious pace—but the energy of God, of which human energy is only a reflection: Blest Jesus, speak the healing Word And inward Vigour give; Then rais'd by Energy divine Shall helpless Mortals live. Words such as ‘Energy’ and ‘Vigour’ act as counterbalance in Doddridge's hymns to the tender and gentle emphasis; and when he uses a word such as

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‘Charms', it can—in a certain context—take on a distinctive meaning, and be the opposite of bland. In hymn CCLXXXII we find: His tender Heart with Love o'erflow'd, Love spoke in ev'ry Breath; Vig'rous it reign'd thro’ all his Life, And triumph'd in his Death. All these united Charms he shews, Our frozen Souls to move; The last line makes the metaphor explicit: this is Christ as the vigorous dayspring, the breath of spring that speaks love, the Charms of spring that unlock the frozen winter of the soul. The preceding hymn, CCLXXXI, ‘A filial Temper the Work of the Spirit, and a Proof of Adoption. Galat. iv. 6.’ ends similarly: On Wings of everlasting Love The Comforter is come; All Terrors at his Voice disperse, And endless Pleasures bloom. The pleasures bloom like spring flowers; the voice of the Holy Spirit disperses the terrors, as the terrors/winter disappear. In Doddridge's hymnody the Saviour is always this force, coming, or standing, or springing up like living water or spiritual warmth. It is the Christian's duty to wait and be ready, as in ‘Ye Servants of the Lord’, or to ‘see’—that is, not to ignore the Saviour who ‘stands’ (‘See Israel's gentle Shepherd stands’). It is not surprising that one of his best-known hymns is the advent one, ‘Hark the glad Sound! the Saviour comes’. The Bridegroom comes: God's grace breathes, warms, overflows, and his table is spread: for Doddridge the great sin is to ignore these things. This is the more wicked, in Doddridge's eyes, because of the evidence of God's providence in national and religious affairs. As a Dissenter, he subscribed to the Whig view of history, which saw the flight of James II in 1688 as the ‘glorious Revolution’, the deliverance from the dangers of Roman Catholicism by the arrival of William of Orange. He was a strong supporter of the Hanoverian succession: during the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, when he was a minister at Northampton, he was active in organizing the defence of the town, and he wrote a hymn which celebrated the hand of God in history, ‘Thanksgiving for the Suppression of the Rebellion, 1746’: Accept, great God, thy Britain's Songs, While grateful Joy unites our Tongues To own the Work, thy Hand has done: Thy Hand has crush'd our cruel Foes, When in rebellious Troops they rose, And swore to tread our Glory down.

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To Doddridge the rebellion was an example of evil forces at work in the world, and in the same hymn he writes: See human Nature sunk in Shame: See Scandals poured on Jesus' Name; The Father wounded through the Son; The World abus'd, and souls undone. The catalogue is comprehensive in its range, from pouring scandal on the holy name, and wounding God in the person of Jesus, to abusing the world: Doddridge may have been thinking about the rebellion, but he was probably also thinking generally about the evils of society. He is one of the few hymn-writers to mention the poor specifically: On his afflicted pious Poor He makes his Face to shine; He fills their Cottages of Clay With Lustre all divine. From such unhappiness, Doddridge, like the other Dissenting writers of his time, looked forward to the end of his pilgrimage in the world beyond. In hymn CCXXI, ‘the Spirit's Influences compared to living Water. John vi. 10’, he uses the common metaphor of travelling through the desert: Our longing Souls aloud would sing, Spring up, celestial Fountain, spring; To a redundant River flow, And chear this thirsty Land below. This verse crosses the idea of pilgrimage with the idea of Christ as the provider of living water, from John 4: 10; but Doddridge goes on to look forward to a world above, where the stream which has been by his side during the journey spreads to become a sea: May this blest Torrent near my Side Thro' all the Desart gently glide; Then in Emanuel's Land above Spread to a Sea of Joy and Love. As A. T. S. James has written, ‘these men of the Old Dissent lived very near to another world’. He quotes Doddridge on the great company of heaven, the Communion of Saints: ‘These heavenly luminaries shall glow with an undecaying flame, and thou shalt shine and burn among them, when the sun and the stars are gone out.’306 Like Bunyan and Watts, therefore, Doddridge looks forward to the Celestial City, the Canaan of the Promised Land; he also has their Dissenting seriousness, which requires the

306

A. T. S. James, ‘Philip Doddridge: His Influence on Personal Religion’, in Nuttall, Philip Doddridge. 40.

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individual to live on this earth with a strict and proper use of the time, and without abusing the world. The word which he uses is ‘Waste’, a significant metaphor in the prudent and thrifty culture of Protestantism in the eighteenth century. It is found in the title ‘Reflections on our Waste of years. Psal. xc. 9. For New Year's Day’, which elaborates on Psalm 90 in a way that is different from Watts's grand view of human life (in ‘Our God, our help in ages past’) and closer to Charles Wesley's hymns for Watch Night services: Yet like an idle Tale we pass The swift-advancing Year; And study artful Ways t'increase The Speed of its Career. Waken, O God, my trifling Heart Its great Concern to see; That I may act the Christian Part, And give the Year to thee. ‘All the world's a stage’: Doddridge's metaphor of human life as acting a part is only one of the many ways in which his writing is in touch with ways of thinking that are literary and cultural. He is the most broad-minded of Dissenting writers; he is also the most eirenic,307 and the most cultured: his hymns speak of his dedication to the service of God, but also of what was described as his ‘learning, piety, and politeness’.308 In its best and widest sense, Doddridge is polite—in its meaning of cultivated, refined, courteous. His hymns associate his tenderness of feeling, and his Dissenting seriousness of purpose, with a literary sensibility that comes from an exposure to a philosophical culture; and his choice of word and image reflects a mind that has engaged with such writers as Racine309 and Shakespeare. The result is a hymnody which is unusual in its range, its accessibility, and its civilized seriousness.

Anne Steele Anne Steele, whose Poems on Subjects Chiefly Devotional was published in 1760, was a poet who wrote in blank verse and heroic couplets as well as in hymn metres. She called herself ‘Theodosia’, thus emphasizing her femininity;

307

He invited Wesley and Whitefield to preach, and the Bishop of Oxford, Thomas Secker, mentions Doddridge's ‘Favourable opinion of the Church of England’ (Stedman, Letters, 280).

308

From Job Orton's memoir of Doddridge, quoted on the title page of Stedman, Letters.

309

See Doddridge on Racine, from a letter of 8 January 1722–3 (Works, v. 507): ‘It is impossible not to be charmed with the pomp, elegance, and harmony of his language, as well as the majesty, tenderness, and propriety of his sentiments. The whole is conducted with a wonderful mixture of grandeur and simplicity, which sufficiently distinguish him from the dulness of some tragedians, and the bombast of others. One of the principal faults is, that the jingle of his double rhyme is frequently offensive to the ear.’

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and her work is of great interest, if only because she was the first major woman hymn-writer. Although she does not explicitly discuss the role of woman as writer, the possessor of her two volumes would have been left in no doubt about the gender of the author because of the frontispiece engravings. In volume I there is a young woman in a garden with an open Bible, held in her left hand, while her right hand points upwards to heaven, past the ruin of a classical temple. Before her sits a demure young woman with a bunch of flowers in her lap, holding a rose in her left hand. In volume II there is a young woman leaning with one elbow on a cross/anchor, looking upward to the beams of light from heaven, approached by another young woman, with a torch of flame coming from her hair, carrying a telescope. The ‘glass’ or telescope is the Bible, described in a poem ‘To Florio’: But upward point that glass of truth, and see A fairer guest, descending from the sky, Celestial hope! 'tis she, my friend, 'tis she Who never pains the heart, or cheats the eye— These emblems (for that is what they are) clearly locate the sensibility of the poems as that of a woman; and Anne Steele's example was to have a considerable effect on the writing of hymns in the next century. Her language of love, for example, looks forward to that of a number of women hymn-writers: I yield, to thy dear conqu'ring arms I yield my captive soul: O let thy all-subduing charms My inmost pow'rs controul! (‘Redeeming Love’)Like Doddridge, she was clearly interested in the poetry of her own time, and she wrote ‘An imitation of Mr. Pope's Ode on Solitude’ and a poem ‘Occasioned by reading Mr. Gray's Hymn to Adversity’. Her view of reason was also a traditional poetic one, and Dryden's word ‘glimmering’, by now a cliché, occurs in a description of the world after the Fall: Then reason, heav'nly flame, with faded lustre Glow'd faintly, its primaeval brightness gone, Sullied and clouded with surrounding guilt; And, feebly glimm'ring with uncertain light, No more it mounts sublime, to earth confin'd. Watts was also a considerable influence: one poem, in an attractive 8.8.6.D. metre, and entitled ‘Christ the Christian's Life’ begins O for the animating fire That tun'd harmonious Watts's lyre To sweet seraphic strains!

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Celestial fire, that bore his mind (Earth's vain amusements left behind) To yonder blissful plains. At other times she quotes Watts's work, or imitates it: a meditation on the Passion, ‘A Dying Saviour’, for example, is derivative in its first verse: Stretch'd on the cross the Saviour dies; Hark! his expiring groans arise! See, from his hands, his feet, his side, Runs down the sacred crimson tide! In some ways the language is more intense and dramatic than that of Watts: where his ‘See from his head, his hands, his feet’ is the steady gaze of devotional contemplation, ‘surveying’ the Cross, Anne Steele's verse has a sudden coup de théâtre in the first line, and the echo of Watts, in this context, is given an intensity and urgency from the dramatic situation (and the exclamation marks, which are common in her work). Only in the second verse does the approach change, from dramatic presentation to theological reflection: But life attends the deathful sound And flows from ev'ry bleeding wound: The vital stream, how free it flows, To save and cleanse his rebel foes! The Crucifixion is now a death that is a life: it is a verse which has to be read with a whole understanding of atonement theology. Anne Steele's verse is often doctrinal in this way: To suffer in the traitor's place, To die for man, surprizing grace! Yet pass rebellious angels by— O why for man, dear Saviour, why? The exclamation, ‘surprizing grace!’ is a variant, characteristically different, on the usual (and very common) ‘amazing grace’: it is also typical of Anne Steele in the way in which it inserts an exclamation in the middle of a verse, and uses a question to probe more deeply than a statement would do. The question ‘why . . . why’, dramatically repeated, is a searching, not just for motives, or for an answer, or for a whole world-view; it is a question which is unanswerable, and therein lies its point: God's ways and purposes are beyond our comprehension. Then come two more questions, more circumscribed, the one requiring the answer ‘yes’, the other ‘no’: And didst thou bleed, for sinners bleed? And could the sun behold the deed? No, he withdrew his sick'ning ray, And darkness veil'd the mourning day.

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The first question takes up the repetition of ‘why . . . why’ in its use of ‘bleed . . . bleed’: then the second question leads back towards narrative. The questions continue in the verse that follows, again echoing Watts in its opening, and also in its mingling of opposites—grief and wonder, love or pain: Can I survey this scene of woe, Where mingling grief and wonder flow; And yet my heart unmov'd remain, Insensible to love or pain? Anne Steele is writing a linguistic variation on Watts, using question after question, weaving her own patterns of feeling among the central mystery of oppositions; then in the final verse her doublings become no longer the union of opposites but parallels—cold/stupid, pow'rs/passions—as she gently detaches herself from the situation in order to consider the appropriate devotional response to it: Come, dearest Lord, thy pow'r impart, To warm this cold, this stupid heart; Till all its pow'rs and passions move, In melting grief and ardent love. Here ‘pow'r’ is opposed to ‘pow'rs’, divine to human: the divine warms the cold and (instructs) the stupid heart, finally producing a heart-movement that in its line-movement (adjective/noun . . . adjective/noun) brings together both opposites and parallels—grief/love, melting/ardent. It is an effective and unobtrusive use of rhetorical art; and, as so often in her work, the hymn modulates from intensity to serenity. Anne Steele is fond of the sharp contrast between human and divine, often expressed in exclamations: Dear Lord, and shall thy Spirit rest In such a wretched heart as mine? Unworthy dwelling! glorious guest! Favour astonishing, divine! The jamming together of two contrary adjectives, often in a parenthetical exclamation, is part of the technique: it is a device which draws attention to the distance between God and humanity, but also suggests the same event seen from two different points of view: Here, the Redeemer's welcome voice Spreads heav'nly peace around: And life, and everlasting joys Attend the blissful sound.

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But when his painful suff'rings rise (Delightful, dreadful scene!) Angels may read with wond'ring eyes, That Jesus died for men. The first of these verses is so tranquil in its rhythm and phrasing, with such simple combinations of adjective and noun (‘welcome voice’, ‘heav'nly peace’, ‘everlasting joys’, ‘blissful sound’) that the mind is lulled into thinking that this is all conventional; suddenly, the interruption of ‘Delightful, dreadful’ throws the mind off course, and makes it see the event of the Passion in a double light, as dreadful (for the suffering involved) and as delightful (for the salvation which it brought). It is probably a borrowing from Matthew Prior, who wrote of the dear dreadful thought of a God crucified310 but it is none the less extremely effective as a surprising element in the hymn verse. Anne Steele often works by such sharp, jagged interruptions to her otherwise even-toned and regular verses. The hymn from which these two stanzas come, ‘The Excellency of the Holy Scriptures’, is one of those by which she is best known: Father of mercies, in thy word What endless glory shines; Forever be thy name ador'd For these celestial lines. The particular marks of her style are the use of nouns and adjectives to produce the expected—‘endless glory’, ‘celestial lines’—which, on second glance, prove to be slightly unusual: the endless glory is not heaven, but the word, the word on the page, and the celestial lines are not the lines of eternal life so much as the lines of Holy Scripture. The art, and the surprise, are often concealed by repetition: Here may the wretched sons of want Exhaustless riches find: Riches, above what earth can grant, And lasting as the mind. This verse articulates an expansion of the mind, from riches as an alternative to want, to ‘Riches’ that exceed all earthly possibilities. Her stanza pattern is one in which there is commonly a run-on from lines 1 to 2, pulling the reader on to the end of the second line (as in ‘Father of mercies’), while lines 3 and 4, by contrast, often work by parallelism:

310

From a Poem of 1685, ‘Advice to the painter. On the happy defeat of the Rebels in the West, and the Execution of the Duke of Monmouth’, published in Poems on Affairs of State (1703).

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O may these heavenly pages be My ever dear delight, And still new beauties may I see, And still increasing light. Divine instructor, gracious Lord, Be thou forever near, Teach me to love thy sacred word, And view my Saviour there. Although Anne Steele was, like Doddridge, a follower of Watts, there are distinct differences between her work and his. Whereas Doddridge versifies a biblical text, like a preacher, she more frequently begins with experience. Most of the titles of her hymns are those of religious experience, but those of her ‘Occasional Poems’ are traditional and moral: ‘The Pleasures of Spring’, ‘An Evening Walk’; and among the hymns there is ‘On a stormy night’: Lord of the earth, and seas, and skies, All nature owns thy sov'reign pow'r; At thy command the tempests rise, At thy command the thunders roar. We hear, with trembling and affright, The voice of heav'n, (tremendous sound!); Keen lightnings pierce the shades of night, And spread bright horrors all around. ‘Bright horrors’ is a descriptive oxymoron, and the hymn uses the Long Metre stanza to great effect. For three verses the storm rages, using appropriate language (rise, roar, affright, keen, pierce, horrors), until it blows itself out in verse 4 with another oxymoron: The dreadful glories of thy name With terror would o'erwhelm our souls; But mercy dawns with kinder beam, And guilt and rising fear controuls. The last line is derived from Isaac Watts's Psalm 46, ‘Thus all our raging fear controls’, but here it is closely linked to the experience of a thunder-storm: O let thy mercy on my heart With cheering, healing radiance shine; Bid ev'ry anxious fear depart, And gently whisper, Thou art mine. The quiet after the storm is beautifully rendered by the idea that the voice of God can be heard in a whisper (as it was in the ‘still small voice’ in 1 Kings 19); and the rhythms of the last verse, by shortening the speech units,

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articulate the slowing down and coming to rest. In the following verse, ‘rest’ is a word to which the first two lines lead, and the broken-up last line is a final slowing of the hymn, to end on a single word, ‘blest’: Then safe beneath thy guardian care, In hope serene my soul shall rest; Nor storms nor dangers reach me there, In thee, my God, my refuge, blest. The skilful articulation of ideas in this hymn, its progression from storm to calm, from the spectacular oxymoron to the expected ‘blest’, is characteristic of Anne Steele's excellent craft, which is extraordinarily good at finding the correct word or phrase for what she wants to say, and contrasting one element of the hymn with another. Thus in ‘The Voice of the Creatures’, describing God's bounty in creation (in the manner of her contemporary James Thomson in The Seasons, or of Joseph Addison), her writing abounds in plurals, doublings, parallelisms, even sometimes quadruplings: There is a God all nature speaks, Through earth, and air, and seas, and skies: See, from the clouds his glory breaks, When the first beams of morning rise: For man and beast, here daily food In wide diffusive plenty grows; And there, for drink, the crystal flood In streams sweet winding, gently flows. By cooling streams, and soft'ning show'rs, The vegetable race are fed, And trees, and plants, and herbs, and flow'rs, Their Maker's bounty smiling spread. The idea is similarly expressed in Thomson's ‘Spring’, where the stream ‘irriguous spreads’ through the valley and the earth ‘is deep enriched with vegetable life’. Thomson also uses the word ‘diffusive’, and at one point in her poetry the blank verse sounds like The Seasons, rewritten by Isaac Watts: Nature spreads An open volume, where in ev'ry page We read the wonders of almighty pow'r! (‘The Pleasures of Spring’)Like Thomson (and Pope, in the Essay on Man), Anne Steele has to come to terms with pain and suffering here on earth. Her answer, like theirs, is that somehow the ordering of things must be right (Pope's ‘whatever is, is right’). Her poem, ‘To Delia Pensive’ begins:

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Say Delia, whence these cares arise, These anxious cares which rack your breast? If heaven is infinitely wise, What heav'n ordains, is right, is best. She is often found endeavouring to come to terms with eighteenth-century experience in this way, sometimes facing the difficulties head-on. Her poem ‘On the Publick Fast. February 6, 1756’ refers to the Lisbon earthquake that Voltaire used to mock Christian optimism in Candide: Tremendous judgements from thy hand, Thy dreadful pow'r display; Yet mercy spares this guilty land, And yet we live to pray. This is an unusual recognition of the event as producing survivor's guilt; and her poetry is often aware of the unworthiness of human conduct—in this case in Britain, as opposed to the unfortunate Portugal: Great God, and why is Britain spar'd, Ungrateful as we are? O be these awful warnings heard, While mercy cries, Forbear. What num'rous crimes increasing rise O'er all this wretched isle! What land so favour'd of the skies, And yet what land so vile! She is aware that human beings need correction: her poem ‘Occasioned by reading Mr. Gray's Hymn to Adversity’ speaks of the mind ‘lost in error's fatal maze’ so that it ‘dreams of lasting bliss below the sky’. Such happiness, of course, is not to be found: but Adversity is a ‘friend to truth’: Though rough thy aspect, and thy frown severe, 'Tis but to bend the proud, the stubborn heart; A soft emollient is thy briny tear, And thy corrosives pain with healing smart. Words such as ‘emollient’ and ‘corrosives’ indicate something of Anne Steele's range of vocabulary. She is a true follower of Watts, not only in her echoing of his phrases, but also in her ability to accommodate the sense to the line: Come ye that love the Saviour's name, And joy to make it known: The sovereign of your hearts proclaim, And bow before his throne.

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Behold your King, your Saviour crown'd With glories all divine; And tell the wondering nations round How bright those glories shine. (‘The King of Saints’)However, she is at her best when she is able not just to make statements (which often, as in this last line, repeat the phrases of others) but to use questions or exclamations. She employs them to probe further than the statements themselves can do, because they gesture towards the unanswered, the mysterious, and the unknown. Through them her hymnody celebrates not just the doctrine of grace, but the application of that grace to human experience: Alas, what hourly dangers rise! What snares beset my way! To heav'n O let me lift mine eyes, And hourly watch and pray. How oft my mournful thoughts complain, And melt in flowing tears! My weak resistance, ah, how vain! How strong my foes and fears! (‘Watchfulness and Prayer. Matt. xxvi. 41) The mood is intense, but as so often the intensity is gradually resolved as the hymn progresses, with an apt and touching repetition in the third line of the final verse: O keep me in thy heav'nly way, And bid the tempter flee; And let me never, never stray From happiness and thee. The ‘never, never’ is a most skilful way of introducing into the verse that kind of human sensibility which is the result of an interaction between doctrine and experience. Her poems and hymns indicate a distinct movement away from the generalized view of divine providence found in Addison, and from-the Christian happiness found in Doddridge. She contemplates the world as a place where good and evil happen (the deaths of children, her own loss of a fiancé), and recognizes its double nature feelingly: she is conscious of its beauty and fertility, but also of its unhappiness. Her solution is to enter into a personal relationship with the Saviour, in a way which parallels the writing of her contemporary Charles Wesley.

Benjamin Beddome Benjamin Beddome, born in January 1717, was a younger contemporary of Anne Steele. He was a Baptist minister at Bourton-on-the-Water in Gloucestershire,

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and his hymns, like those of Doddridge, were designed to be sung after his Sunday sermons. Some of them found their way into print, many in John Rippon's popular Selection of Hymns from the Best Authors, intended as an Appendix to Dr Watts's ‘Psalms and Hymns’ (1787); and in 1818 Robert Hall published the full collection, Hymns Adapted to Public Worship, or Family Devotion. In the Preface he described Beddome as having ‘an acquaintance with the best writers of antiquity, to which he was much indebted for the chaste, terse, and nervous diction, which distinguished his compositions both in prose and verse’. In addition, Beddome knew the modern hymn-writers, and borrowed from them, so that his hymns are more than usually dialogic and intertextual. He uses Watts on a number of occasions, as in this hymn called ‘The Gospel’ (371 in Hall's Collection): Here in the records of his grace, God's brightest glory shines; Here mercy's varied form we trace, As drawn in crimson lines. Whate'er the theme, in every page, His wondrous love appears, My swelling sorrows to assuage, And calm my rising fears— ‘The Importance of Prayer’ (405) contains an unusual and eclectic use of George Herbert, together with phrases from John Newton:311 Prayer is the breath of God in man, Returning whence it came; Love is the sacred fire within, And prayer the rising flame— It gives the burdened spirit ease, And soothes the troubled breast; Yields comfort to the mourners here, And to the weary rest. Beddome (perhaps because he was a minister) was much more conscious of Baptist doctrine than was Anne Steele. He wrote about it in a hymn entitled ‘Signification of Baptism’ (621), in which Hall's remarks about chaste diction were fully exemplified: Lo, this sacred institution Shows the state that we are in, All the subjects of pollution, All unholy and unclean.

311

The date of Beddome's hymn is unknown, so it is impossible to say categorically that he borrowed from Newton; but Newton's hymn appeared in print before Beddome's, so a borrowing by Newton from Beddome is unlikely.

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'Twas the Lord the rite appointed, We his precepts must fulfil, With our duty now acquainted, Yield obedience to his will. The effective contrast between the ‘sacred institution’ of line 1 and the clever simplicity of ‘Shows the state that we are in’ is emphasized by the daring use of the preposition as a rhyme word. Beddome goes straight to the point, with a clarity that is both predictable and admirable, as in the next verse: Now we sink beneath the waters, Emblem of our death to sin; Thence ascending, grace has taught us, We our lives anew begin. The verse is shaped to the movements, downward and then upward, two lines to each: at the semicolon, the pause signifies the point in the service when the body is actually under the water (it is the non-speaking moment of the verse). Only in the fourth verse does Beddome show that he cannot leave well alone: May we feel a change internal, Wrought by power and grace divine; Short of this, each form external Will be found a fruitless sign. Fortunately, this homiletic tendency, found also in Doddridge, is not always evident. Beddome can take an image and allow it to speak for itself. ‘God's Plantation’ (657), for example, is based on Psalm 1: ‘Blessed is the man . . . he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water. . . ’: Planted by God's right hand, Where living waters flow, Like stately trees, believers stand, In comely orders grow. Their fruit knows no decay, Their leaf shall never fade; The Lord's their keeper night and day, And foes shall ne'er invade. Their proper growth attained, He will the plants remove, To Canaan's rich and fertile land, And genial climes above. The idea is pursued without deflection: the trees grow to their proper height and are then ready for planting out in heaven, where the soil is rich and the climate good. It is neatly done, and one can see why Hall said that Beddome

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had a ‘copious vein of attic salt’ in his conversation. In his hymns, this emerges in the way in which he will combine a terse directness with a sudden twist, as in hymn 54, ‘Incarnation and Sufferings’. Jesus is always seen as the Saviour, but not usually as a life-saver in quite such a physical way: He waded through a sea Of overwhelming wrath That wretched sinners, such as we, Might be redeemed from death— It is not clear what the ‘overwhelming wrath’ is, though presumably it means something like ‘human sin’, the evil and death that Christ has to conquer. This absence of clarity is unusual in Beddome's work, where the more usual danger is that he will state the obvious: Thine inward teachings make me know, The mysteries of redeeming love, The emptiness of things below, And excellence of things above. In ‘the Gospel of Christ’ (371) the counterpoint is precise and obvious: Here, sinners of a humble frame May taste his grace, and learn his name; 'Tis writ in characters of blood, Severely just, immensely good. Beddome's clarity and balance, however, conceal a strong imagination which is closer to the Evangelical Revival of Newton and Cowper than to the sweet tones of Doddridge. In ‘Reflections on death’ (777) the images are calculated to produce uneasiness, if not distress: Learn, oh my soul, what 'tis to die! Th'event how solemn, and how nigh; When every tongue shall silent be, These eyes no pleasing object see. The active limbs, the comely face, Turned to a mass of rottenness; The name forgot, the substance gone, No more admired, no longer known. Such a graphic description of bodily decay is unusual in concentrating on the physical body in the grave rather than on the terrors of hell; it suggests that Beddome was thinking of life as ending in an existential pointlessness, for which the only remedy is gospel grace. Jesus Christ saves human beings from a condition of non-being, of lost identity. In describing the Saviour, Beddome uses the same word, ‘charms’, that is found in Doddridge and Berkeley:

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Here, Jesus in ten thousand ways His soul-attracting charms displays, Recounts his poverty and pains, And tells his love in melting strains. (‘The Gospel of Christ’, 371)Such strong contrasts between annihilation and redemption look forward to a later religious taste, and it is not surprising that in the nineteenth century Beddome's hymns were frequently used by the popular preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon in Our Own Hymn Book (1866). Beddome's temperament looks forward to the fear of death and the hope of salvation, expressed in the image of the smile. Writers such as Cowper and Beddome hope for a smile the Saviour as a child looks for a smile from a stern parent: Saviour of souls, could I from thee A single smile obtain, The loss of all things I could bear, And glory in my gain. (‘Self-denial’, 225)If the last line looks back to Watts and to Galatians 6: 14, the second line is akin to Cowper (‘Behind a frowning Providence | He hides a smiling face’); and Beddome is a link between two traditions, the Old Dissent of Watts and the pre-Romantic intensity of the Evangelicals. He has been described by Horton Davies as an ‘indefatigable sermon summarizer in verse’,312 which implies that his hymns are predictable, homiletic, and boring; sometimes they are, and there are verses that might have been written by anyone, consisting of hymnological catchphrases fitted together. Elsewhere, however, Beddome has a style which is usually recognizable, a clarity of line and simplicity of image. It gives him a certain individual voice in the transition of eighteenth-century hymnody from the grandeur of Watts to the sensitivity of Cowper.

Samuel Stennett Samuel Stennett (1727–95), the third Baptist hymn-writer of this period, was the grandson of Joseph Stennett; his hymns lack the grandeur and excitement of his grandfather's work, perhaps because the Puritan tenacity has been replaced by a more urbane form of dissent. One of Samuel Stennett's works, for example, is A Trip to Holyhead, an agreeable piece dating from 1793 in which, during a coach journey, a Dissenter discourses with a Churchman and sets him right about the behaviour of Dissenters.

312

Davies, Worship and Theology in England, 136.

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The Churchman believes that they are supporters of the French Revolution, but he is assured that, although some are, others are far too prudent and sensible. The company breaks up at Holyhead in a state of great amiability and mutual regard. Stennett's hymn-writing is unoriginal precisely because it has no distinct aim and technique; it seems to be content to follow Watts, as in ‘The Promised Land’:313 On Jordan's stormy banks I stand, And cast a wishful eye To Canaan's fair and happy land, Where my possessions lie. O the transporting rapt'rous scene That rises to my sight! Sweet fields, array'd in living green, And rivers of delight! But Stennett's echoes of Watts serve only to emphasize the difference between them: Come, ye that fear the Lord, And listen, while I tell How narrowly my feet escap'd The snares of death and hell. (‘Praise for Conversion, Psalm lxvi. 16’) Stennett lacks the clarity of Watts, the absolute precision which makes his hymns so powerful. Watts's ‘How beauteous are their feet’, for example, becomes: How charming is the place, Where my Redeemer God Unveils the beauty of his face, And sheds his love abroad! (‘The Pleasures of Social Worship’) Stennett is aware of the need for conversion, but often his hymns are exercises in the pleasures of religion: Let avarice, from shore to shore, Her fav'rite God pursue; Thy word, O Lord, we value more Than India or Peru. Here the neat ending (picked up, perhaps, from Johnson's The Vanity of Human Wishes) is followed by humdrum metaphor and jog-trot rhythms:

313

The texts of Stennett's hymns are from The Works of Samuel Stennett, D. D., ed. William Jones (London, 1824).

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Here mines of knowledge, love, and joy, Are open'd to our sight; The purest gold without alloy And gems divinely bright. Stennett's hymns represent the decline of the Baptist tradition into the unexciting. William Jones, who edited Stennett's works in 1824, said that ‘We never find Dr Stennett going in quest of the sesquipedalia verba; there is no affected strut, no deep imposing sound, no great swelling words of vanity . . . ’.314 Jones's virtues are, in fact, Stennett's defects: his hymns would have been enlivened by some sesquipedalia verba (words of many syllables) as Charles Wesley's are, or by some deep imposing sound. As it is, the verses, even in his best hymns, sound as if they might have been written by any eighteenth-century writer: No more, dear Saviour! will I boast Of beauty, wealth, or loud applause: The world hath all its glories lost Amid the triumphs of thy cross. In every feature of thy face, Beauty her fairest charms displays; Truth, wisdom, majesty, and grace, Shine thence in sweetly-mingled rays. Stennett's hymns are difficult to sing because they are somehow inert, metrical arrangements of religious experience (Lowell's ‘quatrains shovelled out four-square’) without the energy and excitement of the metrical psalmists or the early Baptists. The dependence on Watts proves destructive to originality. Stennett is like one of Harold Bloom's weak poets, who imitate their predecessors rather than fight against their practice.315 The energy to be original passed, sometime in the 1730s, to the Methodists.

314

Stennett, Works, i. p. xxviii. The phrase ‘sesquipedalia verba ’ is originally from Horace, De Arte Poetica.

315

See Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (New York, 1973).

9 John and Charles Wesley My God, I know, I feel thee mine And will not quit my claim

The Beginnings: John Wesley as Translator John Wesley's attention was drawn to the possibilities of hymn-singing in worship, and its potential, during his voyage to Georgia (October 1735–February 1736). On board ship were a party of twenty-six Moravians, and Wesley began to learn German in order to talk to them, and to join in their singing. One of the books which he used for translation practice was the Moravian hymn-book, Das Gesang-Buch der Gemeine in Herrnhut, which had been published in that same year, 1735. In addition he used a hymn-book by Johann Anastasius Freylinghausen, either the Geist-reiches Gesang-Buch of 1704 or the Neues Geist-reiches Gesang-Buch of 1714.316 Wesley translated thirty-three German hymns from the Herrnhut Gesang-Buch.317 Some were by the great seventeenthcentury writer, Paul Gerhardt (1607–76), and by Johann Scheffler (1624–77); the majority were inspired by the religious revival known as Pietism, centred on Halle, and from the Moravian movement, based on Count Zinzendorf's estate at Bethelsdorf (where the Moravians built their ‘Herrnhut’ community). In both cases the emphasis was on individual religious experience and on personal piety: in Gerhardt's work there is also a devotional and mystic strain, which is found similarly in the poetry of Gerhard Tersteegen (1697–1769). Wesley's choice of these writers, and his affinity with them, suggests that he was in pursuit of a religious pattern of behaviour more in keeping with seventeenth-century mysticism and Puritanism than with the Latitudinarian theology of his own day.

316

Wesley took the words of his hymns from the Herrnhut Gesang-Buch, but used Freylinghausen for the tunes. See Henry Bett, The Hymns of Methodism (3rd edn., London, 1945), 15–16.

317

The texts and translations are printed, not always accurately, in John A. Nuelson, John Wesley and the German Hymn, trans. Theo Parry, Sydney H. Moore, and Arthur Holbrook (Calverley, Yorks, 1972).

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The history of the Evangelical Revival and the development of Methodism has often been described, and Wesley's life has been the subject of many biographies, from Robert Southey's onwards. It will be sufficient here to relate that life to Wesley's work as translator, writer, and compiler, beginning with his admiration for the Moravian practice of hymnsinging and for the behaviour of the party on board ship, especially during the storm of 25 January 1736, when the ship nearly foundered. Shortly after arriving in Georgia, inspired by their example, Wesley set about collecting hymns for a hymn-book, which he published at Charlestown in 1737 as A Collection of Psalms and Hymns. The contents of this book are an indication of Wesley's taste at the time. They include seven hymns by the Roman Catholic John Austin, adapted from George Hickes' Reformed Devotions, six of George Herbert's poems from The Temple altered to make them suitable for easy singing, and three of Addison's hymns from the Spectator. The most heavily represented writer was Isaac Watts, and these confirm Wesley's predilection for hymns of fervour and inward piety; he also included poems by his father and his brother Samuel. His own translations ‘From the German’ (as they are entitled) are five in number. Probably the least successful is the second, from Zinzendorf's ‘Reiner bräutgam meiner seelen’, where Wesley's rhythm is uncertain and the inversions seem forced: Jesu, to thee my Heart I bow, Strange Flames far from my Soul remove: Fairest among Ten Thousand thou, Be thou my Lord, my Life, my Love. All Heav'n thou fill'st with pure desire; O shine upon my frozen Breast; With sacred Warmth my heart inspire May I too thy hid Sweetness tast.318 The images seem awkward and uncoordinated, perhaps because Wesley is trying too hard to include the German ‘flamm’ and ‘kalt-gewordne’. Far more impressive is the translation from Ernst Lange's ‘O Gott, du tiefe sonder Grund’, in which Wesley has room to spread himself in twelve-line stanzas. These correspond to Lange's fourteen-line verses, and in both cases the eight-syllable lines are managed with skill, using polysyllabled words, with probing questions and (in Wesley's English version) exclamation marks: O Gott, du tiefe sonder Grund! wie kan ich dich zur gnüge kennen?

318

If the translation was printed in the 1737 Collection of Psalms and Hymns I have taken the text from the facsimile, John Wesley's First Hymn Book, ed. Frank Baker and George Walton Williams (Charleston, SC, 1964). Translations first printed in later books are quoted from Nuelsen, with corrections.


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du grosz höh, wie soll mein mund dich nach den eigenschafften nennen? du bist ein unbegreifflich meer: ich sencke mich in dein erbarmen.— O God, thou bottomless abyss, Thee to perfection who can know? O height immense! what words suffice Thy countless attributes to show? Unfathomable depths Thou art! O, plunge me in thy mercy's sea; Words such as ‘ground’, ‘abyss’, ‘height’, ‘sea’ are characteristic of Wesley's imagery in attempting to describe the Godhead, and he seizes upon such resonant lines as ‘du bist ein unbegreifflich meer’ turning it into a stronger prayerimperative (‘O, plunge me’). The sea image returns later: Unchangeable, all-perfect Lord, Essential life's unbounded sea, What lives and moves, lives by Thy word, It lives and moves and is from Thee. The recurrence of the sea image is Wesley's invention. God is a bottomless abyss, a sea of mercy. In the next verse, this leads Wesley back through the German to the traditional eighteenth-century imagery of Dryden and the fideists: Heaven's glory is Thy awful throne, Yet earth partakes Thy gracious sway: Vain man! thy wisdom folly own, Lost is thy reason's feeble ray. Although this sounds like Dryden or Pope, it comes from the German: Der himmel ist dein thron und sitz, und du regierest auch auf erden. Vor dir musz aller menschen witz als unvernunfft beschämet werden. Perhaps because it is such a long poem (ten verses of twelve lines each—Wesley translated eight verses) it is remarkably inclusive in its references: God leads forth ‘the immortal armies of the sky’ (verse 5): yet he is also in earth as well as beyond it: Each Evening shews thy tender Love, Each rising Morn thy plenteous Grace; Thy waken'd Wrath doth slowly move, Thy willing Mercy flies a Pace. ‘Barmhertzigkeit und grosze treu’: God's mercies are new every morning (Lamentations 3: 22–2): as a response to the wonder of God, and to his

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merciful love, the hymn ends with praise, and Lange's ‘heilig, heilig, heilig heiszet’ becomes Thrice Holy, thine the Kingdom is, Th'almighty Power is thine; And when created Nature dies, Thy ceaseless Glories shine; this is how the text was printed in 1737, even with a concluding semicolon. When Wesley refashioned the hymn for Hymns and Sacred Poems in 1739, he altered the metre to make all the lines of eight syllables (originally lines ten and twelve of each verse had six). The result is that the last part of each verse takes on the grandeur and expansiveness associated with Long Metre: Thrice holy, thine the kingdom is, the power omnipotent is thine; And when created nature dies thy never-ceasing glories shine. The effect of the 12-line stanzas is now that of Long Metre × 3; and much of the power of the hymn depends upon its succession of images, its accumulation of sense impressions. Naturally, it is long for a hymn (it was divided into two parts in the 1780Collection, and has since been truncated drastically in successive Methodist books, losing its arresting first line in 1983), but in its original form it suggests that Wesley found in the German text a range and energy that expressed some of his youthful intensity and enthusiasm. It took him far beyond the Latitudinarians, and even beyond Isaac Watts, although Watts's influence can be felt in the great descriptions of the created world. The five German hymns in the 1737 book represent a small selection only of the thirty-three which Wesley translated. Many of them were from the Moravian tradition, and in one of them, August Gottlieb Spangenberg's ‘Der König ruht und schauet doch’, Wesley gives an enthusiastic commendation of the Moravian settlement: He prospers all His servants' toils: But of peculiar grace has chose A flock, on whom His kindest smiles And choicest blessings He bestows; Devoted to their common Lord, True followers of the bleeding Lamb, By God beloved, by men abhorr'd;— And HERRNHUTH is the favourite name! This is Wesley's invention: the German is quite unspecific: Er hat sich auch in sonderheit vor seinen augen auserkoren


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Ein volk, das sich in einigkeit zur dienstbarkeit bey ihm verschworen,— Wesley visited Herrnhut in 1738, not long after his own ‘conversion’: he saw there the persecuted people who had been allowed by Count Nicholas von Zinzendorf to build on his estate, and was greatly impressed by their community life. He had already taken to himself their religion of the heart in his own conversion process. In 1740, however, he broke with the Moravians in London because of their emphasis on ‘stillness’, which to Wesley was Quietism taken to unacceptable lengths. During these early years, however, the German hymns which he translated were steadily being published in his early hymn-books: the Collection of Psalms and Hymns of 1738, the Hymns and Sacred Poems of 1739 and 1740, the Collection of Psalms and Hymns of 1741, and the Hymns and Sacred Poems of 1742. Not all of them remained in use, even in Wesley's own lifetime; but in the 1780Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People called Methodists about half of them were printed. The finest of them are the seventeenth-century hymns of Gerhardt and Tersteegen. Number 335 in the 1780 book, for example, is a translation of Tersteegen's ‘verborgne Gottes-Liebe du’, first published in 1739 with the title ‘Divine Love. From the German’. It begins with the imagery of height and depth which is characteristic of these hymns, and ends with a line which Wesley neatly imports from St Augustine: Thou hidden love of God, whose height, Whose depth unfathomed, no man knows; I see from far thy beauteous light, Inly I sigh for thy repose; My heart is pained, nor can it be At rest, till it finds rest in thee. Tersteegen's seven-line stanzas are abbreviated to six-line ones, and the rhythm of the verse-units (with the enjambement, usually, in the final couplet) makes an important contribution to the measured progress of the hymn; while the addition from St Augustine (‘irrequietum est cor nostrum, donec requiescat in te’) fits snugly into the end of the verse. Similarly, Tersteegen's verse 6, which includes a reference to the child— ein recht gebeugt, einfaltig kind am ersten dich, o Liebe findt; Da ist mein hertz und wille— is enlivened by the use of Romans 8: 15: O Love, thy sovereign aid impart To save me from low-thoughted care! Chase this self-will through all my heart, Through all its latent mazes there;

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Make me thy duteous child, that I Ceaseless may Abba, Father, cry. The modern editors of the 1780Collection note that the unusual phrase, ‘low-thoughted care’, occurs in Pope's Eloisa to Abelard, and that a similar phrase is found in Milton's Comus. It seems as though Wesley, using the German text as a base, was bringing to it the fruits of his reading in theology and English poetry. Such a process is found again in the translation of Paul Gerhardt's ‘O Jesu Christ, mein schönstes Licht’, called ‘Living by Christ. From the German’ in the 1739Hymns and Sacred Poems. It contains, as the editors note, phrases from Matthew Prior, Samuel Wesley, and Shakespeare. It begins, as these hymns often do, with a ‘-less’ word, reaching out (like ‘bottomless’ and ‘unfathomed’) to a reality known only to the mystics: Jesu, thy boundless love to me— This is very free with Gerhardt's first line, with its ‘schönstes Licht’, although Wesley's second line, ‘No thought can reach, no tongue declare’, skilfully compresses Gerhardt's der du in deiner seelen so hoch mich liebt, dasz ich es nicht aussprechen kan! noch zählen:— The English line, with its elegant caesura, is part of the rhetoric of this hymn, which depends heavily on balance and syntactical parallelism. It is found again in verse 4: Hourly within this soul renew This holy flame, this heavenly fire;— The last verse begins: In suffering be thy love my peace, In weakness be thy love my power;— which brings out a parallelism which is suggested in the German text: Lasz sie seyn meine freud im leid; in schwachheit mein vermögen: Gerhardt's text continues: und wenn ich, nach vollbrachtem streit, mich soll zur ruhe legen: alsdenn lasz deine Liebestreu, Herr Jesu, mir beystehen, lufft zuwehen: dasz ich getrost und frey mög in dein reich eingehen!


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Wesley's translation deftly includes a great many elements: And when the storms of life shall cease, Jesu, in that important hour, In death as life be thou my guide, And save me, who for me hast died. The word ‘important’ is used, here and elsewhere by Wesley, in its original sense (OED 1) ‘Having much import or significance; carrying with it great or serious consequences; weighty, momentous, grave, significant.’ Its precision is matched by the unfussy neatness with which the various parts of the final sentence are slotted into place—the adverbial clause, followed by the subject, ‘Jesu’, followed by another adverbial clause—in which the meaning of the first is deepened; this is followed by two prayer-imperatives—‘be thou my guide, | And save me’—where again the meaning is deepened in the second, supplementary clause. The movement of the verse is thus a continuous process of adding to and supplementing an original statement, even in the final line—‘me, who for me hast died’. This is, of course, a description of Jesus the Saviour, but the repeated ‘me’ is a reminder also of the status of the human being as one who has been ‘died for’. Wesley's translation of Gerhardt is concerned with love, the boundless love of God in Christ, and the corresponding need for love in the human soul. It is a theme which recurs in Wesley's German translations, finding its most spectacular expression in the hymn by Johann Andreas Rothe, ‘Ich habe nun den grund gefunden’: O Love, thou bottomless abyss! My sins are swallowed up in Thee:— The images are found in the German: ‘O abgrund’ (abyss) and ‘verschlungen’ (swallowed); and the last line of Rothe's fourth verse (Wesley's third), with its magnificent repetition, is also transposed into ‘Mercy, free boundless mercy’: O abgrund, welcher alle sünden durch Christi tod verschlungen hat! das heiszt die wunde recht verbinden: Da findet kein verdammen statt: Weil Christi Blut beständig schreit: Barmhertzigkeit! Barmhertzigkeit! After this verse the word ‘Barmhertzigkeit’ is used to conclude every stanza of Rothe's hymn, ending with a line which draws together theme and image: O abgrund der Barmhertzigkeit!

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Like Rothe, Wesley uses the six-line stanza to produce a series of variations on the theme of mercy, and in most of the verses he allows the meaning to unfold in a series of subordinate clauses, which are a feature of these translations. In verse 1, for example, he prefers a subordinate clause to Rothe's question in line 3 (‘wo anders, als in Jesu wunden?—Where else, except in Jesu's wounds?’), preferring to let the exposition unroll: Now I have found the ground wherein Sure my soul's anchor may remain,— The wounds of Jesus, for my sin Before the world's foundation slain: Whose mercy shall unshaken stay, When heaven and earth are fled away. The great paradox of the hymn is that the anchor of the soul is fixed in a ground which is also an ‘abyss’ (verse 3) and a ‘sea’ (verse 4). It is as though the mercy of God transcends all attempts to categorize it, as verse 2 says: Father, thine everlasting grace Our scanty thought surpasses far;— It is a ground to hold an anchor (the anchor of hope in Hebrews 6: 19), but it is also a sea to plunge into, boundless, and an abyss to swallow sins, bottomless. But against this instability of the imagery is the constant of mercy, and also the disciplined structure of the hymn. This is seen most clearly in the final verse, which departs from Wesley's usual practice by dividing up the stanza into three interconnected parts: Fix'd on this ground will I remain, Though my heart fail, and flesh decay: This anchor shall my soul sustain, When earth's foundations melt away; Mercy's full power I then shall prove, Loved with an everlasting love. The three sections recapitulate the headings of the hymn: the ground; the anchor; and the power of mercy. This first two vividly return the reader to verse 1, both in terms of the ground/anchor image (the anchor is not found in Rothe's final verse) and in the reference to the foundation(s) of the world. In verse 1 Jesus was slain before the foundation of the world (Ephesians 1: 4), and in verse 6 the mercies will continue ‘When earth's foundations melt away’. Wesley is following the German tendency, here as elsewhere, to make patterns of religious experience, repeating phrases, using rhymes, returning to the beginning at the end. Wesley's German translations offer new possibilities to the world of eighteenth-century hymnody. To the experience of Tate and Brady, of Baxter, Addison and Watts, the world of Puritan devotion, high seriousness,


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and Newtonian physico-theology, they import an entirely new element—the spectacular: Jesu, thy blood and righteousness My beauty are, my glorious dress: 'Midst flaming worlds, in these array'd With joy shall I lift up my head.319 Wesley's dislike of what he calls ‘fondling’ expressions does not, of course, prevent him from using the language of love, as in the dignified ‘Thee will I love, my strength, my tower’ (from Scheffler's ‘Ich will dich lieben, meine stärcke’). It is seen also in his translation of the French visionary Antoinette Bourignon's ‘Venez, Jesus, mon salutaire’, published in Hymns and Sacred Poems in 1739, and again in the 1780Collection.320 Wesley found enough in her writings to edit them for his followers, but in so doing he toned down Bourignon's distinctive doctrines; her hymn remains as an example of the language of love applied to religious experience: Thee I can love, and Thee alone, With pure delight and inward bliss: To know Thou tak'st me for Thine own, O what a happiness is this! Nothing on earth do I desire But thy pure love within my breast; This, only this, will I require, And freely give up all the rest. By importing the language of love here, Wesley was—dangerously—only doing what he was doing in his German hymns: adding richly to the language of religious expression which could be used in hymnody. This can be seen in his vocabulary: words and phrases appear with striking

319

Zinzendorf's original, ‘Christi blut und gerechtigkeit | das ist mein schmuk und ehrenkleid’, is inspired by Isaiah 61: 10 (‘ . . . he hath clothed me with the garments of salvation, he hath covered me with the robe of righteousness’). The boldness of the image, and the direct application to personal religious experience, are characteristic of the heady enthusiasm of the Moravian Gesang-Buch, with its emphasis on the glories of God in Christ, and on the wonders of his mercy and grace. The excitement of such hymnody caused Wesley some alarm, perhaps because of the language of love which was used. He wrote of his selectivity as a translator: ‘I did not take all that lay before me, but selected those which I judged to be most scriptural, and most suitable to sound experience. Yet I am not sure that I have taken sufficient care to pare off every improper word or expression—every one that may seem to border on a familiarity which does not so well suit the mouth of a worm of the earth, when addressing himself to the God of heaven. I have indeed particularly endeavoured, in all the hymns which are addressed to our blessed Lord, to avoid every fondling expression, and to speak as to the most high God; to him that is “in glory equal with the Father, in majesty co-eternal”.’

320

There is a possibility that the translation may have been by John Byrom. See A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People called Methodists, ed. Franz Hildebrandt and Oliver A. Beckerlegge (Oxford, 1983), 424–5. For a hostile view of Antoinette Bourignon, see Ronald Knox, Enthusiasm (London, 1950), 352–5.

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effect: ‘I plunge me in thy mercy's sea’; ‘bottomless abyss’; ‘depth unfathomed’; ‘Jesu, whose glory's streaming rays’; ‘O God of good the unfathomed sea’; ‘Grace is the anchor of the soul’; ‘Open the fountain from above’. In these phrases, and many others like them, Wesley imported from Germany a diction which not only extended the range of hymnody but which encouraged the Evangelical revival by giving it a new language, a vivid imagery for the glory of the God and the excited sensitivities of the converted soul.

John Wesley as Hymn-Writer It is not clear exactly how many hymns John Wesley wrote, because a number of the early hymn-books of the brothers were described on the title pages as ‘by John and Charles Wesley’. Most of the Methodist hymns were by Charles, but a few have been acknowledged as the work of John: I shall discuss only those which are regarded as being by him in the modern edition of the 1780Collection.321 It is significant that Wesley was a good translator and adapter. Although his versions of George Herbert in the 1737Collection of Psalms and Hymns are insensitive to the delicacy of Herbert's original phrase and metre, some other appropriations were very successful. Wesley was responsible for changing Isaac Watts's ‘Our God, our help in ages past’ into ‘O God, our help’, and he made a brilliant selection and alteration of ‘Come, we that love the Lord’, which survived in Methodist books until 1983; he also made fine versions of poems by the Cambridge Platonist Henry More. This ability to use other texts and adapt them to his own hermeneutics is seen in his poetic elaboration of the Lord's Prayer, written in nine Double Long Metre verses and published in Hymns and Sacred Poems (1742). It is entitled ‘The Lord's Prayer Paraphrased’, but that title conveys nothing of the hymn's character except the structure that determines its progression. It is characteristic of Wesley's spirituality at this time: in particular, it introduces the saving grace of Jesus Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit into the Lord's Prayer. In its verse technique, it draws heavily on the practice he developed when translating: his fondness for doublings, and his ability to carry the sense through whole verses in a string of subordinate clauses or supporting parallels. The final verse actually reuses the concluding lines from the first of his German hymns, Ernst Lange's ‘O Gott, du tiefe sonder Grund’. As in the German hymns, Wesley deftly inserts quotations, phrases from the Bible and the English poets and hymnwriters. In the first verse,

321

Bett (The Hymns of Methodism, ch, 3) argued on a number of stylistic grounds that some hymns usually attributed to Charles were in fact written by John. Other scholars have disagreed. See A Collection of Hymns, ed. Hildebrandt and Beckerlegge, 35–8.


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for example, ‘this universal frame’ had been used by both Milton and Dryden: Father of all, whose powerful voice Called forth this universal frame, Whose mercies over all rejoice, Through endless ages still the same; Thou by thy word upholdest all; Thy bounteous love to all is showed; Thou hear'st thy every creature's call, And fillest every mouth with good. ‘Our Father, which art in heaven’ has now become a recollection of God as Creator and Preserver, with the sense carried through to the main verb in line 5, followed by three more supporting clauses. Similarly, in verse 2 ‘hallowed be thy name’ becomes an extended display of magnificence, twice expressed in threes, ‘Earth, air, and sea . . . Wisdom, and might, and love’: In heaven thou reign'st enthroned in light, Nature's expanse beneath thee spread; Earth, air, and sea, before thy sight, And hell's deep gloom, are open laid. Wisdom, and might, and love are thine; Prostrate before thy face we fall, Confess thine attributes divine, And hail the sovereign Lord of all. Again the verbs are important in the second half of the verse, as the worshipper is induced by the majesty of God to fall, confess, and hail. This echoes the ‘three form’, which appears again in the following verse, repeating the ‘confess’ and adding yet more verbs of adoration: Thee, sovereign Lord, let all confess That moves in earth, or air, or sky, Revere thy power, thy goodness bless, Tremble before thy piercing eye; All ye who owe to him your birth, In praise your every hour employ; Jehovah reigns! Be glad, O earth, And shout, ye morning stars, for joy. ‘The Lord Jehovah reign’s from Isaac Watts (and Psalm 93) is linked beautifully to the quotation from Job which ends the verse. At this point, Wesley has written three extended verses on the first two phrases of the Lord's Prayer—‘Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name’. They are an exercise in the vocabulary of magnificence, and

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show how much Wesley had gained from his intimate acquaintance with the German texts and traditions. With the next two phrases of the prayer, ‘Thy will be done, Thy kingdom come’, he shifts attention to God the Son and God the Holy Spirit: Son of thy Sire's eternal love, Take to thyself thy mighty power;— Spirit of grace, and health, and power, Fountain of light and love below,— Similarly, the next phrase, ‘Give us this day our daily bread’, begins with God but ends with Jesus: it celebrates God as the maker and preserver of the lilies of the field, but also prays to be fed with grace and with ‘living bread’ (John 6). The rest of the prayer is more briefly paraphrased, which perhaps indicates Wesley's own hermeneutical preferences. In particular, he modifies the prayer to ‘Forgive us our trespasses’, which becomes a prayer for salvation rather than forgiveness: Eternal, spotless Lamb of God, Before the world's foundation slain, Sprinkle us ever with thy blood; O cleanse and keep us ever clean! And ‘as we forgive them that trespass against us’ becomes a prayer that God may be seen in us: To every soul (all praise to thee) Our bowels of compassion move, And all mankind by this may see God is in us—for God is love. ‘Lead us not into temptation’ also emphasizes the inward possession of free grace and the filled heart: Thine, Lord, we are, and ours thou art; In us be all thy goodness showed, Renew, enlarge, and fill our heart With peace, and joy, and heaven, and God. Wesley's hymn is therefore a radical reinterpretation of the Lord's Prayer in terms of God as Creator, Jesus as Saviour, and the Holy Spirit as inner influence. Thus the hymn ends with a prayer to the glorious Trinity, part of which was imported from Wesley's translation of Ernst Lange. It brings to the original an eschatological emphasis Till all thy foes confess thy sway, And glory ends what grace begun


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but it also stresses the individual heart experience, the filled heart which then demonstrates the love of God in its action. The phrase which appears again and again in the hymn is ‘in us’: Inflame our hearts with perfect love, In us the work of faith fulfil, So not heaven's host shall swifter move Than we on earth to do thy will. It is perhaps because this hymn is based on a firm structure, and because it so cleverly incorporates a whole range of biblical and hymnological quotations, that this is John Wesley's most notable contribution to the Methodist tradition, with the possible exception of his alteration of a hymn by Henry More. In the 1739Hymns and Sacred Poems it was entitled ‘On the Descent of the Holy Ghost at Pentecost’, and began ‘When Christ had left his Flock below’: it survives as two hymns, ‘On all the Earth thy Spirit show'r’ and ‘Father! if justly still we claim’. Together with the paraphrase of the Lord's Prayer, and the translations from German and French (and Spanish), it suggests that John Wesley's strength was the useful adaptation of the work of others.322

John Wesley as Hymnologist Wesley's 1780 hymn-book has often been admired. It was extravagantly praised by Bernard Manning as worthy of comparison with King's College Chapel, Leonardo's Last Supper, and other great works of religious art. Manning's words have often been quoted with approval, but they are excessive in their enthusiasm; and Wesley's compilation is better seen for what it is, a near-definitive collection for early Methodists (not definitive, for it leaves out some significant hymns, such as ‘Jesu, lover of my soul’) and ‘a little body of experimental and practical divinity’. These words come from the Preface, dated 1779, in which Wesley carefully lays down the principles of compilation: ‘The hymns are not carelessly jumbled together, but carefully ranged under proper heads, according to the experience of real Christians.’

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This is confirmed by that way in which he abridged and adapted the work of prose writers, distributing them to his followers in pamphlet form. His own hymns in the 1780 Collection (if they are by him) do not make particularly notable contributions to Methodist hymnody. Wesley is at his best when using the kind of rhetoric which he learned when translating, such as the reduplication of nouns and adjectives—‘humble, and teachable, and mild’—or: ‘Come, O my comfort and delight | My strength, and health, my shield and sun; | My boast, and confidence, and might, | My joy, my glory, and my crown! | My gospel hope, my calling's prize, | My tree of life, my paradise.’ (1780, no. 368) John Wesley's skill with other people's work—a touch here, a skilful adaptation there, a slight shift in hermeneutical perspective—makes the reader wonder if some of Charles Wesley's hymns benefited from his brother's intervention.

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The words ‘experimental’ and ‘practical’ connect this book with the Puritanism of the seventeenth century. ‘Experimental’ links religion with experience, the patterns of religious behaviour found in Puritan spiritual autobiography;323 while the works of such writers as Richard Baxter were known as ‘practical works’ (concerned with the practice of religion, and not theoretical or speculative). The book is therefore compiled to speak to the individual believer: its exploration of religious experience follows the course of the individual soul in pilgrimage. At the same time, Wesley insisted that in the gospel of Christ ‘Solitary Religion is not to be found’.324 Accordingly, the final section of the book, from hymn 447 to 525, is ‘For the Society, meeting/Giving Thanks/Praying/Parting’, ending with a vision of glory: Live till the Lord in glory come, And wait his heaven to share! He now is fitting up our home— Go on! we'll meet you there! The homeliness of the last two lines makes an appropriate conclusion to a book which owes its strength to a knowledge of the human heart, its aspirations, its failures, its triumphs and despairs. As the modern editors have pointed out, this has affinities with Wesley's sermons, which were designed (and published) to guard the believer ‘from formality, from mere outside religion, which has almost driven heart-religion out of the world’.325 One result of Wesley's proceeding was that there is no recognition of the great festivals of the Christian year—Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Easter, Ascension-tide, Pentecost. Some of the omissions are astonishing: Doddridge's ‘Hark the glad sound’ is not used, and Charles Wesley's ‘Hark, how all the welkin rings’ and ‘Glory be to God on high’, two of the finest Christmas hymns, are missing. So is ‘Christ the Lord is risen today’, for Easter, and ‘Hail the day that sees him rise’ for Ascension Day. Also missing are some of Charles Wesley's great sacramental hymns, such as ‘Come, Holy Ghost, thine influence shed’ and ‘Jesu, we thus obey’, together with Watts's Communion hymn ‘When I survey the wond'rous cross’. The modern editors argue that the Methodists would have attended their local parish church, where they would celebrate the Christian festivals and take Holy Communion: but the fact that many of these hymns were added by Wesley's successors is a reminder that the book was assembled on a distinctive (and ultimately disabling) principle. The 1780Collection, therefore, omits many of the hymns available to Wesley which would be considered essential to any standard hymn-book

323

R. C. Monk, John Wesley, his Puritan Heritage (London, 1966), 168 ff.

324

John Wesley, Preface to Hymns and Sacred Poems (1739), p. viii.

325

See A Collection of Hymns, 55.


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of the last 200 years; their omission shows the absurdity of Manning's description of the book as ‘perfect, unapproachable, elemental in its perfection’.326 It would be much better described as interesting and idiosyncratic, in the light of those patterns of eighteenth-century religious experience that it turns away from (no Addison, no Doddridge; only seven hymns by Watts). It is a very strong statement of what Wesley believed to be necessary: thus Addison's hymns of praise and gratitude, which Wesley had used in 1737, were no longer included. There is a section entitled ‘Describing the Goodness of God’, but it begins with Samuel Wesley's (John's father's) Behold the Saviour of mankind Nailed to the shameful tree;— and the section is almost entirely concerned with the redeeming love of Christ; it contains some of Charles Wesley's most dramatic and moving hymns on the Crucifixion. Part I, ‘Containing Introductory Hymn’s begins with the prophet-preacher's ‘Exhorting and beseeching to return to God’ (the word ‘return’ suggesting a former state, now lost, as in the Old Testament description of the children of Israel). Then come two sections, directing the mind to ‘1. The pleasantness of Religion’ and ‘2. The goodness of God’, followed by the ‘Four Last Things: Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell’ (the last containing one hymn only). Part I concludes with ‘Praying for a Blessing’ (containing some hymns on the Holy Spirit). Part II is entitled ‘Convincing’, and it deals with that topic so dear to the eighteenth-century evangelicals, the distinction between ‘formal’ and ‘real’ religion (here called ‘Inward Religion’). When that stage has been passed, Part III deals with the crisis points of conversion: Praying for Repentance/ For Mourners convinced of Sin/Brought to the Birth/ Convinced of Backsliding/Recovered. Wesley's handling of this difficult stage, with its awareness of sin and its hope of a new birth in Christ, is extensive: there are twenty hymns in ‘convinced of Sin’ and thirty-seven in ‘brought to the Birth’. The five stages are characterized by an existential anxiety, set against the saving love of Christ: they lead to the state of being a ‘Believer’, when the Christian life really begins. Although Part IV, ‘For Believers’, begins with Wesley's translation of J. A. Rothe, ‘Now I have found the ground, wherein’, its headings show that the Christian life is subject to many vicissitudes: ‘For Believers Rejoicing/Fighting/Praying/Watching/Working/Suffering/Groaning for full Redemption/Brought to the Birth/Saved/Interceding for the World’. The ‘Rejoicing’ section is very large, from 182 to 256, and it contains Wesley's paraphrase of the Lord's Prayer, translations from the German, and Charles Wesley's ‘And can it be, that I should gain’,

326

Bernard Manning, The Hymns of Wesley and Watts (London, 1942), 14.

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written shortly after his conversion (the ‘conversion hymn’, ‘Where shall my wond'ring soul begin?’, is not in the book). Also substantial is the section ‘Groaning for full Redemption’ (331–79), which suggests an important second stage, a movement towards what Wesley, in A Plain Account of Christian Perfection, described as ‘the heaven of heavens [which] is love’. There is, he said, ‘nothing higher in religion; there is, in effect, nothing else’.327 This section, therefore, contains such hymns as ‘Love divine, all loves excelling’ and ‘Father of everlasting grace’; it leads to a second ‘Brought to the Birth’, the desire to be at one with God in love and ‘inward holiness’ (hymn 394). The hymns which follow, in ‘For Believers Saved’, are not for celebrations so much as prayers to resign the self to the service of God: Serve with a single heart and eye, And to thy glory live and die.328 This leads naturally to ‘Interceding for the World’, which is a very eighteenth-century section, concerned less with social problems than with the unchristian state of the world: so it includes ‘For the Mahometans’, ‘For the Heathens’, ‘For the Jews’ (all following the Good Friday Collect, which Wesley as an Anglican clergyman would have known), ‘For England’, ‘For the Fallen’, ‘For the King’, ‘For Parents’, ‘For Masters’, ‘For Children’, and ‘For the Baptism of Adults’. Part V turns from the individual to the religious society, and in its conception of a praying and loving community it represents something dear to Wesley. To him ‘The Community of Saints’ was not the great unity of the living and the dead in Christ so much as the fellowship of believers: Build us in one body up Called in one high calling's hope—(Hymn 501) This community meets, gives thanks, prays together, takes part in love-feasts (505–8) and disperses; but in parting it knows the joy of being ‘one in heart’: Blest be the dear, uniting love That will not let us part; Our bodies may far off remove— We still are one in heart. And the final exhortation is to ‘Lift up your hearts to things above’. Wesley chose his hymns, therefore, and arranged them, according to his own pattern and for his own purposes; and the 1780Collection illustrates his belief about the progress of the soul and the importance of a religious

327

A Plain Account of Christian Perfection, quoted in A Collection of Hymns, ed. Hildebrandt and Beckerlegge, 19.

328

John Wesley preached ‘On a Single Eye (from Matthew 6: 22–3) fifty years later, on 25 Sept. 1789.


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community. In the service of that community he was prepared to edit the hymns thoroughly: to remove what he saw as amatory phrases or verses, and to abbreviate or split hymns to make them easily singable. He did this with his brother's hymns as well as his own; and for a full understanding of the Methodist contribution to hymnody, we must turn to Charles Wesley.

Charles Wesley: The Originating Impulse Charles Wesley dated the assurance of his salvation to a religious experience of 21 May 1738, three days before his brother felt his heart ‘strangely warmed’ at a meeting in Aldersgate Street. Both John and Charles Wesley had come to know the power of hymns through their contacts with the Moravians, and during that eventful week, Charles began to write a hymn on his conversion: Where shall my wond'ring soul begin? The question is sharp and direct. It indicates an immediate problem for someone who is anxious to record a spiritual experience of such importance. Where does a wondering soul begin? How is its deepest feeling to be expressed? If the whole experience is of such encircling splendour, how does the writer break in to the circle, where does he start? Is there a language which is capable of expressing such truth, such beauty, such amazement, such ecstasy? O how shall I the goodness tell, Father, which thou to me hast showed? This second verse changes the question slightly from ‘Where’ to ‘how’, but essentially it is the same problem: how does the writer begin to describe such splendour, such forgiveness and love? He can say only that he is Blest with this antepast of heaven! But to go further is very difficult: Charles Wesley sees the struggle with language as part of the war between good and evil, in that the devil can tempt him to say nothing: Shall I, the hallowed cross to shun Refuse his righteousness t'impart By hiding it within my heart? Hiding it within his heart would be the equivalent of the servant hiding his talent in the ground; so Charles Wesley responds to his own question: No, though the ancient dragon rage, And call forth all his host to war; Though earth's self-righteous sons engage,

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Them and their god alike I dare: Jesus the sinner's friend proclaim, Jesus, to sinners still the same. Writing hymns becomes itself a ‘daring’ of the god of earth's self-righteous sons, perhaps the Deists; and the hymn has provided a kind of answer to the first question about where to begin: it begins with the self, the wondering soul, and with Jesus as the sinner's friend (Matthew 11: 19, Luke 7: 34). But this is only a beginning: Charles Wesley's uncertainty about how to express his deepest thoughts is revealed in the final verse, which is a complex echo of Isaac Watts: For you the purple current flowed In pardons from his wounded side; Languished for you th'eternal God For you the Prince of glory died. Believe, and all your sin's forgiven, Only believe—and yours is heaven! This is the first attempt to answer the question—‘Where shall my wond'ring soul begin?’ In this particular case it declines to provide a direct answer, and turns towards those in need: Outcasts of men, to you I call, Harlots, and publicans, and thieves! He spreads his arms t'embrace you all Sinners alone his grace receives;— This first attempt at a hymn naturally and inevitably leads to more attempts, and then more: the truth of Jesus Christ as saviour is to Charles Wesley so compelling that he has to go on writing and writing about it. It could be said, I think, that every attempt was incomplete: that between the originating thought and its expression comes the limiting factor of language, so that a writer faced with such a subject cannot do justice to it in a single hymn. Where does every hymn begin? And this raises a further question—where should it end? How can such a subject ever be exhausted? To Charles Wesley this was a major problem: each single hymn has its own necessary compass and structure, yet each one is incomplete. The answer to such questions of beginning and ending, therefore, is found in Charles Wesley's compulsive writing during the next thirty or forty years. His prodigious and prolific output suggests an attempt to answer that first question again and again; so that the question becomes ‘how can I ever end?’. The writing of the conversion hymn was based upon an immediate personal experience, and Charles Wesley's hymns have a kind of urgency which comes from a direct application to the self. Thus very shortly after the first hymn, he wrote another in the same metre:


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And can it be, that I should gain An interest in the Saviour's blood? Died he for me, who caused his pain? For me? Who him to death pursued? Amazing love! How can it be That thou, my God, shouldst die for me? This is another attempt, using the same kind of literary medium of rhetorical questioning, to find language for the great experience. So every attempt is a new beginning, and every hymn is, in T. S. Eliot's words, a different kind of failure. The ‘And’ at the beginning of the first line may be an indicator of this: it suggests a continuation of the grace that had given rise to the first hymn, and also a continuation or development of that hymn. And if ‘Where shall my wond'ring soul begin’ fails to answer its initial question, so that it turns to publicans and sinners, the second hymn provides another kind of answer, supplementing the first non-answer by turning inwards (the first verse keeps on repeating ‘for me’) to record the sense of new freedom and of reconciliation to God. In its first printing in 1739, ‘And can it be’ was entitled ‘Free Grace’, and so the emphasis is now on mercy, echoing and answering mystery as an attribute of God: 'Tis myst'ry all: th'Immortal dies! Who can explore his strange design? In vain the first-born seraph tries To sound the depths of love divine. 'Tis mercy all! let earth adore! Let angel minds inquire no more. The questions are now slightly different from those in the conversion hymn. The first one is ‘And can it be’—‘is it possible?’; and the second is ‘Who can explore his strange design?’ The answer is no one (even the angel-mind of the oldest seraph tries in vain)—and the poet himself, who dares to explore the design in the next three verses: He left his Father's throne above— Long my imprisoned spirit lay,— No condemnation now I dread,— The hymn is startlingly dynamic, moving from questioning to the astonishing assurance of the final lines: Bold I approach th'eternal throne, And claim the crown, through Christ, my own. The last qualifying clause fits neatly into place as a necessary part of the pattern: Charles Wesley approaches the throne of God not through his own merits but through the ‘free grace’ of the poem's title. To get to this point

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the hymn has progressed through a rapid sequence of perceptions, from amazement, to mystery and mercy, to freedom and life. One line in verse 4, ‘Thine eye diffused a quick'ning ray’, emphasizes this by borrowing from Pope's Eloisa to Abelard (‘Thy eyes diffused a reconciling ray’) and altering the adjective to ‘quick'ning’: the theme is the awakening to new life, and the later verses emphasize this by their use of verbs of activity—‘I woke . . . I rose, went forth, and followed’. ‘Salvation’ is not a word that Charles Wesley uses very much: he prefers the metaphors of wakening, of rising up, of loosening chains, of being free.329 ‘And can it be’ is more widely known than the conversion hymn, and more frequently used, probably because it is a more successful attempt to articulate the sense of new birth: the conversion hymn turns away from the personal to address other sinners and draw them in to the circle of God's love, whereas ‘And can it be’ articulates the movement from sleep/death to waking/life through one person's experience of free grace. Its images recur in the hymns of this post-conversion period: Come, Holy Ghost, all quick'ning fire, Come, and in me delight to rest! (1780, 363) Arm of the Lord, awake, awake, Thine own immortal strength put on (1780, 375) Since the Son hath made me free Let me taste my liberty;— (1780, 379) The recurrence of these active images suggests that Charles Wesley was trying out the same words in different contexts, bringing his love of metaphorical language to a great variety of spiritual experience. James Montgomery saw this variety as one of Charles Wesley's most distinctive attributes as a hymn-writer: Christian experience, from the deeps of afflictions, through all the gradations of doubt, fear, desire, faith, hope, expectation, to the transports of perfect love, in the very beams of the beatific vision,—Christian experience furnishes him with everlasting and inexhaustible themes; and it must be confessed, that he has celebrated them with an affluence of diction, and a splendour of colouring, rarely surpassed.330 Montgomery, as usual, is precise and perceptive: Charles Wesley has an amazing range of mood and tone, and from the conversion hymns onwards his work has some affinities with the spiritual autobiographies of seventeenth-century Puritan writers, or with Bunyan's Christian. Another reason

329

‘Salvation’ is found (in conjunction with a line from ‘And can it be’) in John Wesley's translation of Wolfgang Christoph Dessler's ‘Mein Jesu dem die Seraphinen’: ‘I taste salvation in thy name, | Alive in thee, my living head!’ This translation must have been made before 1739, when it was published in Hymns and Sacred Poems : it is impossible to say whether John took it from Charles or Charles from John.

330

James Montgomery, The Christian Psalmist (Glasgow, 1825), pp. xxi–xxiii.


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for the copiousness of Wesley's work is the desire to record the variety of moods, the gradations (as Montgomery called them) of the Christian on pilgrimage. It is this copiousness and diversity of mood and spirit which distinguishes him from other hymn-writers: it is one of the principal differences between Wesley and Watts. For although in Horae Lyricae Watts claimed to be a scorner of petty restrictions and critical limits, his hymn-writing is decorously ordered, and his volumes are shaped by controlling ideas. Wesley's enthusiasm led him to attempt almost every kind of religious subject: he was by turns, as W. F. Lofthouse put it, ‘convert, preacher, pastor, controversialist, expositor, divine’.331 His expressions of faith do not entirely exclude his fears and doubts, so that his hymns understand incredulity and questioning, as well as comprehending the assured grandeur of Watts. Wesley's hymnody is remarkable for the neverceasing exploration of different moods and of the varieties of religious experience. The vast quantity of hymns, written, as I have suggested, in response to the first question of the first hymn, is evidence of this. But what is also characteristic is Wesley's richness, the density of each line and each verse: it is almost as if his hymns have a higher specific gravity than those of other writers. This skilful compression of thought and image, this density, is Charles Wesley's distinctive feature as a hymn-writer. It comes from an ability to address the Christian experience, as he finds it in the society of his own day and as he would wish it to be; more specifically, it comes from his ability to incorporate into his hymnody references from a wide variety of sources: from the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, from poets both sacred and profane, and from other texts. This intertextuality (together with a distinctive physicality, which will be discussed later) is responsible for the density referred to above. I use the word intertextuality as it has come to be used by contemporary critics, to indicate the way in which Wesley's texts are written in relation to, or borrowing from, or writing against, previous texts. Indeed, if T. S. Eliot was right and ‘immature poets imitate’ while ‘mature poets steal’,332 then Charles Wesley demonstrates his maturity on every page. It is this conspicuous ability to forge the texts which he takes over and uses into a living and energetic unit, to shape them to accord with what he wants to say, that is the mark of his best hymnody.

331

W. F. Lofthouse, ‘Charles Wesley’, in Rupert Davies and Gordon Rupp (eds.), A History of the Methodist Church in Great Britain (London, 1965), 135. This seems to me to be one of the finest essays on Charles Wesley, ending with an eloquent appeal for unity between the Church of England and the Methodist Church through the shared lex credendi and lex orandi of Wesley's hymns and the Book of Common Prayer.

332

T. S. Eliot, ‘Philip Massinger’, in Selected Essays (3rd edn., London, 1951), 206. The whole quotation is relevant to Charles Wesley's hymns: ‘Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.’

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A study of Wesley's use of the Bible and of the Book of Common Prayer reveals much of his character and belief. But the influences on him are much wider, and the biblical material is blended with references to other writers, echoes of their phrases and vocabulary, and of their treatment of the same spiritual or social condition. More strikingly indicative, perhaps, are the borrowings from non-religious writings, in which Wesley finds secular phrases (often concerned with love) and appropriates them, taking them over for Christ. Such a process is revealing and charged with emotion: unlike the quotations from the Bible, or those from Herbert and Watts, which are used in parallel, as expressions of devotion, the phrases from secular writers are often wrenched triumphantly from their original context, snatched up and used for a religious purpose. Charles Wesley's intertextuality, therefore, is not just a matter of his finding material in other writers, but of an emotionally charged appropriation.

Harlots, and Publicans, and Thieves The conversion hymn has a verse which will serve as an illustration. Charles Wesley has asked a question at the beginning, but then turns away from it to address a new audience: Outcasts of men, to you I call, Harlots, and publicans, and thieves! Why, specifically, does he use these three categories of sinner? In many of his early hymns Wesley directly addresses an audience of sinners, often strikingly in the first lines, but never so precisely: Come, sinners, to the gospel feast;— Sinners, turn, why will you die?— Sinners, obey the gospel word— Come, ye weary sinners, come,— And in a hymn from Redemption Hymns (1747) he combines the two, adding drunkards as a further category: Sinners my gracious Lord receives, Harlots, and publicans, and thieves, Drunkards, and all the hellish crew These openings sound the note that is found early in St Mark's Gospel: ‘I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance’ (Mark 2: 17). The text itself is radical, but Wesley foregrounds it so that it becomes a prominent and fundamental text in his early hymnody. The line ‘Harlots, and publicans, and thieves’ may also, in part, come from the same passage from St Mark, where in verses 15 and 16 the phrase ‘publicans and sinners’ is repeated three times.


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Wesley adds harlots and thieves, and this is very revealing. It suggests that he was fusing the biblical text with the social conditions of his own time. Prostitution was a major evil in eighteenth-century London: it had recently been brilliantly depicted by Hogarth, in The Harlot's Progress, published originally in 1732. The six prints, which depict the arrival in London and the downfall of an innocent country girl, feature Mother Needham, a well-known brothel-keeper of the 1730s, and Colonel Charteris, a notorious libertine and rake; and almost immediately, a ballad opera called The Jew Decoy'd; or the Progress of a Harlot was devised and printed in 1733. It was one of a whole series of ballad operas on the subject published during this period; and looking at their texts, it is not difficult to see why Charles Wesley's conversion hymn was addressed to harlots.333 Harlots were something of an obsession in the London of the 1730s, and continued to be so: but if harlots were a topical subject, so was taxation. Wesley's word ‘publican’, of course, ties his hymn to the quotation from St Mark's Gospel, but it may also have a more specific reference. During the 1730s Sir Robert Walpole attempted to reshape the system of taxation, in order to reduce the burden on the country gentlemen. He reduced the Land Tax, and initiated a series of indirect taxes, on salt in particular, which were widely seen as benefiting the rich at the expense of the poor. The ‘excise crisis’ led to a bitter election of 1734, and ‘the word excise’, as Paul Langford has written, ‘united briefly the whole nation from the peasant to the peer’.334 The third of Wesley's words, ‘thieves’, is another clear indication of his interest in contemporary affairs. For many of the criminal underclass, stealing was a way of life and a means of survival:335 Defoe's Moll Flanders (1724) was a good example of someone who lived in such a way, and London, in particular, contained a substantial and intricate network of thieves, pickpockets, burglars, and fences. They were brought to public notice by their spectacular careers and their ultimate downfalls: Jonathan Wild, the gang-leader who made a profession out of ‘restoring’ stolen property, was hanged in 1725, and Jack Sheppard, who confessed to ‘robbing almost every one that stood in my way’, was executed in 1724, after escaping from prison on several occasions. Undeterred by the fate of these two criminals, their successors of the 1730s and 1740s engaged in something of a crime wave.

333

The saucy ballads in the operas also suggest one reason why John Wesley was so anxious to avoid expressions of endearment in hymns: in The Female Parson: Or, Beau in the Sudds, which was acted at the New Theatre in the Hay-Market and printed in 1730, the songs are disturbingly close to hymns in tune and metre, though not, of course, in sentiment: ‘I adore thee, charming Creature, | And to please wou'd pawn my Soul; | Beauty sits in ev'ry Feature, | And thy Eyes in Magick rowl: | I adore thee, charming Creature, | And to please wou'd pawn my Soul.’ To someone who was ‘serious’ about religion, such a song would have been deeply offensive.

334

Paul Langford, The Excise Crisis (Oxford, 1975), 3.

335

See John Rule, Albion's People, English Society, 1714–1815 (London, 1992), 26.

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And while the criminal underclass continued to steal in the streets and burgle houses, another class of thieves flourished in the City. Financial scandals, such as those of the South Sea Company and the Derwentwater Trust, caused considerable public indignation, which increased when Walpole shielded some of the beneficiaries from punishment. John Gay's The Beggar's Opera of 1728, which was set in Newgate, brilliantly drew attention to what Gay called the ‘Similitude in Manners in high and low Life’. Charles Wesley had personal experience of both kinds of thievery: he was robbed by a highwayman near Oxford in 1737, and he was deceived in Georgia by the Dutch confidence-trickster Appee. It is perhaps not surprising that thieves joined harlots and excisemen in his rogues' gallery. His hymnody may be seen as part of a growing concern for public morals, found in Hogarth's engravings and in the novels of Samuel Richardson. For example, when he added drunkards to the list in 1747, he was responding to the same social evil that was portrayed in Hogarth's Gin Lane. Throughout his life Charles Wesley continued to be aware of social and political problems, and his hymns were frequently occasioned by national events. In 1745, concerned at the Jacobite rebellion, he published Hymns for Times of Trouble, and in 1746 Hymns for the Public Thanksgiving after the defeat of the rebels at the battle of Culloden Moor. Hymns Occasioned by the Earthquake, March 8, 1750 appeared in 1750, and was reissued, presumably as a consequence of the Lisbon earthquake, in 1756. Near the end of his life he was concerned about the American Revolution; and the Gordon riots gave rise to Hymns written in the Time of the Tumults, June 1780. Wesley's characteristic response to these events is to link them with an appropriate piece of scripture and Christian doctrine: thus the earthquake of 1750 becomes, naturally enough, a reminder of the frailty of humanity, a call to repentance, and a plea for salvation through Jesus Christ. The earthquake sharpens the preacher's word and makes it more urgent, and in the final hymn of Hymns Occasioned by the Earthquake the inhabitants of this unstable and transient world are invited to contemplate the permanence and safety of Sion: God most merciful, most high, Doth in his Sion dwell, Kept by him their towers defy The strength of earth and hell; Built on her o'ershadowing rock, Who shall her foundations move, Who her great defender shock, The almighty God of love. Into this verse are built phrases from the psalms and from the New Testament in a complex pattern of interweaving phrases, typical of Charles Wesley's poetic technique.


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The concern with social and political problems is linked with Wesley's imagery of fighting. The sense of being at war with a moral degeneracy in the nation was strong among serious clergymen at this time: a good example is John Brown's An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times, published in 1757, which asserted that ‘We are rolling to the Brink of a Precipice that must destroy us.’336 Brown, who was Vicar of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, condemned the irreligion of the age and the low esteem in which the clergy were held; the popularity of his book (it went through four editions in the first year) suggests that he was only putting into words what many people felt. Brown reminded his readers that a few years before ‘a Mob of ragged Highlanders marched unmolested to the Heart of a populous Kingdom’.337 He used the word ‘effeminacy’ to denote the degeneration of national life; similarly Hogarth's The Rake's Progress depicts a luxurious and selfish life-style which ends in disaster.338 In the same way Charles Wesley's hymns commend a strenuous life: Leave no unguarded place, No weakness of the soul, Take every virtue, every grace, And fortify the whole;— An overview of eighteenth-century society in all its corruption (not unlike that of Brown, but pre-dating it by ten years) is found in Hymns for those that seek, and those that have Redemption in the Blood of Jesus Christ, published in 1747. There Wesley pleads for a Godless nation: Shepherd of souls, with pitying eye The thousands of our Israel see; (1780: 80) The sheep are in the desert, with ‘neither food nor feeder’, with ‘Nor fold, nor place of refuge near’. This may of course be read in a primary sense as referring to the spiritual failure of the country; but there are also references to actual social evils: Thy people, Lord, are sold for nought, Nor know they their Redeemer nigh— In the spiritual sense the people of ‘our Israel’ (Britain) are sold into the slavery of sin: but ‘sold for nought’ also has a striking relevance to the actual slavery of Wesley's day, to prostitutes, and chimney-sweeper boys, and domestic servants, and all those who appear in the engravings of Hogarth or the poems of Blake in situations of degeneracy and servitude.

336

John Brown, An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (London, 1757), i. 15.

337

Ibid. 91.

338

The idea that idle and selfish men are responsible for the degeneration of a society is one that goes back at least as far as Paradise Lost. The conduct of the corrupt generations before the flood is blamed by Adam on the influence of women, but he is rebuked by the Archangel Michael for thinking so; ‘From man's effeminate slackness it begins’ (XI. 634).

10 Charles Wesley and His Art O for a thousand tongues to sing My great Redeemer's praise!

Charles Wesley and the Bible ‘A skilful man, if the Bible were lost, might extract much of it from Charles Wesley's Hymns’, wrote J. Ernest Rattenbury.339 This is an attractive idea; it would not work, if only because Charles Wesley's borrowings depend for their significance on a knowledge of the original contexts. There would be episodes but no narratives, signifiers but no contexts or codes. But Rattenbury's suggestion, however exaggerated, is a reminder of the extraordinary range and pervasive use of the Bible in Wesley's hymns. The quotations come from many different sources: from Genesis and Exodus, from the Psalms and Isaiah in the Old Testament; from the Gospels, the Pauline and Johannine Epistles, and Revelation in the New Testament. He had his favourite passages: Philippians 2, Ephesians 3 and 6, Romans 8, Revelation 5; but he derived inspiration from almost every part of the New Testament, and from many corners of the Old. The debts are recorded meticulously in modern editions of his work;340 but what is interesting is not just the debts themselves but the ways in which they were used. Wesley's hymns removed the original words from their contexts and reused them: the phrases were selected, privileged, and reapplied. The reader acknowledges both the original meaning and the appropriation. ‘The Old and the New Testaments’, said Blake, ‘are the great code of art’.341 The Bible is indeed the code-book with which we can read Charles Wesley's hymns, and his hymns are dense with allusion and image. Whole narratives are sometimes taken over: one example is ‘Wrestling Jacob’, from

339

J. Ernest Rattenbury, The Evangelical Doctrines of Charles Wesley's Hymns (London, 1941), 48.

340

See, for example, the modern edition of A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People called Methodists, ed. Oliver A. Beckerlegge and Franz Hildebrandt (Oxford, 1983); and the Companion to Hymns and Psalms, ed. Richard Watson and Kenneth Trickett (Peterborough, 1988).

341

Quoted in Northrop Frye, The Great Code (London, 1982), 80.

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Genesis 32: 24–32, which will be discussed separately. At present, I do not propose to recatalogue the borrowings, repeating the work that has already been done; but to ask how the appropriations function in Charles Wesley's art. In the first place, it is a development of a tradition. Sternhold and Hopkins, Wither, Milton, Tate and Brady, Isaac Watts, all versified Holy Scripture—first the psalms, then other lyrical passages, and then other texts. Wesley's technique is the same, but freer, more spontaneous, a natural development: like a composer finding new harmonies and modulations, he finds new combinations and juxtapositions, Old Testament fitted to New Testament, and New to Old. So in Short Hymns on Select Passages of the Holy Scriptures (1762), he writes on Leviticus 6: 13 (‘The fire shall ever be burning upon the altar; it shall never go out’): O thou who camest from above The pure celestial fire t'impart, Kindle a flame of sacred love On the mean altar of my heart! The verse from Leviticus has immediately become metaphor, the fire in the heart kindled by the Saviour: and Appendix C of the modern edition of the 1780Collection lists six possible references to the Bible, two from the New Testament and four from the Old.342 The deft interweaving of phrases is virtuoso work, not only because it combines phrases with a remarkable versatility from a wide range, but also because it fits them so beautifully into the lines and verse forms. Similarly a verse such as Behold the servant of the Lord! I wait thy guiding eye to feel, To hear and keep thy every word, To prove and do thy perfect will, Joyful from my own works to cease, Glad to fulfil all righteousness. has at least one quotation (two from the Old Testament, six from the New in the verse) in every line; it appears to be an effortless and natural progression of ideas, proceeding at a decorous pace, held firmly within the stanza form without strain of fuss. And as each line, and each quotation, succeeds the last, the assembly brings into a new relationship diverse phrases, which now interact with one another to illuminate each other. Wesley had the great advantage of working from one English version, the Authorized Version of 1611. Its phrases have entered the English language as proverbs or as poetry: and for many people, biblical language enabled them to find a ‘voice’, to express emotion or to crystallize a thought. Wesley

342

A Collection of Hymns, ed. Hildebrandt and Beckerlegge, 7.

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represents this facility in an extreme form: his familiarity, from a lifetime of devotional reading, enables him to speak in biblical phrases quite naturally. He writes his own text, as a complex tissue of phrases, apparently without effort. Even his journal is full of such things: ‘her soul is delivered out of the snare of the fowler’;343 ‘I will perform my vows unto the Lord, of not hiding his righteousness within my heart’.344 These phrases recur in the hymns (the last in the conversion hymn); but in the hymns Wesley sometimes becomes surprisingly witty, striking sparks off the phrases as they come into contact with one another: Author of faith, eternal Word, Whose Spirit breathes the active flame, Faith, like its finisher and Lord, Today as yesterday the same. The initial source is the metaphor from Hebrews 12: 2—‘Jesus the author and finisher of our faith’—but the idea is wonderfully complicated by adding ‘eternal Word’. Jesus is the author, but also the Word: he is the author of our faith, in that he ‘wrote’ it, but he is also that faith itself, author and word. The two words ‘Author’ and ‘Word’ nod to each other from either end of the line: the paradox is meaningful and almost playful, certainly enlivening. So too Jesus is there at the end, as well as in the beginning, at the origins of faith. He is a finisher as well as an author, ‘the same yesterday, and today, and for ever’ (Hebrews 13: 8). He is Alpha and Omega, beginning and end: it is he who in the Spirit breathes the active flame. Wesley has enriched the biblical texts by allowing them to interact with one another: John 1 (the Word) touches Hebrews 12 and 13. Not only does this surprise and delight; it also reminds the reader how strenuously and consistently Wesley's teaching is based on the Bible. The multiplicity of references is a guarantee of sound doctrine, giving the hymns a proper authenticity. Frequently Wesley appropriates biblical texts and reads them as metaphors, applying them to the state of the human soul. This is the case with the fire of Leviticus. It occurs with place-names, to considerable effect: Thou art now, as yesterday, And evermore the same. Thou my true Bethesda be; By calling Jesus ‘my true Bethesda’, Wesley not only sticks closely to the biblical narrative of healing but adds the metaphorical interpretation of mercy. Similarly, ‘God of all power, and truth, and grace’ makes the

343

The Journal of Charles Wesley (London, 1849), ed. Thomas Jackson, i. 179.

344

Ibid. i. 94.


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Canaan of the Old Testament, promised to Abraham and his seed, the type of a rest in Christ and his love: Oh! that I now, from sin released, Thy word may to the utmost prove: Enter into the promised rest, The Canaan of thy perfect love. In the words of the editors of the 1780Collection, ‘as Wesley rhymes his way through the books of the Old Testament, the Christological interpretation is basic and compelling’.345 As they point out, Wesley's doctrine is found in these hymns: but the vitality of that doctrine is owing to his expression of it, and that expression owes much to his supple and skilful adaptation of biblical phrases and episodes to the human condition. The next section will demonstrate his use of both religious and secular sources.

The Book of Common Prayer In The Hymns of Methodism, Henry Bett pointed out the Wesleys' debt to the Book of Common Prayer.346 He quotes Psalm 45: 4: ‘Gird Thee with Thy sword upon Thy thigh, O Thou most Mighty, according to Thy worship and renown’, which becomes: Gird on thy thigh the Spirit's sword, And take to thee thy power divine; Stir up thy strength, almighty Lord, All power and majesty are thine: Assert thy worship and renown; O all-redeeming God, come down! The whole hymn, beginning ‘My heart is full of Christ, and longs | Its glorious matter to declare’ is a paraphrase of verses 1–4 of the psalm in the Book of Common Prayer version; but the interesting thing about the paraphrase is not the way in which Charles Wesley echoes the very phrase of the psalm, as in My ready tongue makes haste to sing The glories of my heavenly King. which echoes ‘My tongue is the pen of a ready writer’; so much as what Charles Wesley adds to his originating text. From Isaac Watts he learned the trick of altering the psalms, to make David ‘speak the language of a Christian’; thus on this occasion the King is, from the very first line of the

345


346

Henry Bett, The Hymns of Methodism (rev. edn. London, 1945), 74. See also J. R. Watson, ‘Charles Wesley's Hymns and the Book of Common Prayer’, in Thomas Cranmer, ed. Margot Johnson (Durham, 1990), 204–28.

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hymn, Christ, and the third verse ends with the reference to the ‘all-redeeming God’. The fourth verse makes this explicit: Dispread the victory of thy cross, Ride on, and prosper in thy deed; so that the hymn, which originates with the God of might in Psalm 45, also includes the redemptive power of Christ and the workings of the Holy Spirit: Gird on thy thigh the Spirit's sword,— This line transforms verse 4 of the psalm by fusing it with Ephesians 6: 17: ‘And take the sword of the Spirit’. There are three elements of the Book of Common Prayer which were used by Charles Wesley: The Prayers and Orders of Service (principally for the Holy Communion); the Psalms; and the Collects. Charles Wesley's attachment to the Prayers, for example, is illustrated by his use of the General Thanksgiving. His paraphrase of it is one of three thanksgiving hymns, written in the same 10 10.11 11. metre and found in Hymns and Sacred Poems (1742). It begins with a reference to ‘Almighty God, Father of all mercies’, but expands it to draw out the meaning of ‘all thy goodness and loving-kindness to us, and to all men’ into a metaphor of the generous and benevolent store-keeper with his abundance of riches: O heavenly King, look down from above; Assist us to sing thy mercy and love: So sweetly o'erflowing, so plenteous the store, Thou still art bestowing, and giving us more. Similarly, the next section, ‘We bless thee for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life’ is given an extra emphasis to underline the ‘here and now’ element of the prayer, the thanksgiving for present blessings in this life, and the evangelical need to make this known to all people: O God of our life, we hallow thy name; Our business and strife is thee to proclaim. Accept our thanksgiving for creating grace; The living, the living shall show forth thy praise. The ‘preservation’ element of this part of the General Thanksgiving is reserved for the next verse, together with ‘all the blessings of this life’; again God is transformed into the ‘donor’, the bountiful giver: Our Father and Lord, almighty art thou; Preserved by thy word, we worship thee now; The bountiful donor of all we enjoy, Our tongues, to thine honour, and lives we employ.


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The last line here jumps forward in the prayer to the hope ‘that we shew forth thy praise, not only with our lips, but in our lives’. The next verse, which deals with the Redemption, should (if following the General Thanksgiving exactly) have preceded this; but it is held back by Charles Wesley in order to make a climax to the hymn, a forward movement of increasing power which corresponds to the lines in the prayer following ‘all the blessings of this life’: —but above all, for thine inestimable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ; for the means of grace, and for the hope of glory—. Charles Wesley spots the ‘above all’, and uses it with an exclamation, ‘O’ (‘Oh!’ in the original text) to indicate amazement and wonder: But O above all thy kindness we praise, From sin and from thrall which saves the lost race; Thy Son thou hast given the world to redeem, And bring us to heaven whose trust is in him. There are echoes here of John 3: 16: ‘For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.’ That this is the climax of the hymn is suggested by the final verse, which is dependent upon it: Wherefore of thy love we sing and rejoice, With angels above we lift up our voice; Thy love each believer shall gladly adore, For ever and ever, when time is no more. This is the equivalent of ‘walking before thee in holiness and righteousness all our days; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom with thee and the Holy Ghost be all honour and glory, world without end . . . ’; but by making this verse so closely linked with the preceding one, Charles Wesley is restructuring the General Thanksgiving to give more prominence to the Redemption. The original prayer asks God to ‘give us that due sense of all thy mercies, that our hearts may be unfeignedly thankful’; the hymn foregrounds the supreme act of Redemption as the great cause for thanksgiving. To be sure, the prayer does say ‘above all’; but the hymn really does sharpen that awareness of salvation by its structure and shape. The General Thanksgiving is used in other places, for example in a hymn of dedication and thanksgiving at the beginning of a new year, ‘Sing to the great Jehovah's praise’: Our lips and lives shall gladly show The wonders of thy love, While on in Jesus' steps we go To see thy face above.

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Our residue of days or hours Thine, wholly thine, shall be, And all our consecrated powers A sacrifice to thee. The reference to ‘lips and lives’ is unmistakably from the General Thanksgiving, and ‘on in Jesus’ steps' is a rendering of ‘walking before thee in holiness and righteousness all our days’, taking the metaphor of walking and adapting it so that the progress of this life becomes a preparation for the next; what remains of our time on earth is to be employed in ‘giving up ourselves to thy service’. Charles Wesley's word ‘sacrifice’ (echoing Romans 12: 1) stiffens the original ‘giving up ourselves’ and makes it more demanding. Other hymns are influenced by phrases from the Order of Morning Prayer, such as the lines from ‘All glory to God in the sky’ which echo the second collect, for Peace—‘O God, who art the author of peace and lover of concord’— Receiving its Lord from above, The world was united to bless The giver of concord and love, The prince and the author of peace. Here the original metaphor ‘author of peace’ has been preserved, and ‘lover of concord’ has been expanded to make God the giver of concord rather than the lover of it. And there are echoes of other Orders of Service in Charles Wesley's hymns, such as the reference to the Litany in ‘Would Jesus have the sinner die?’, a dramatic hymn on the sufferings of Christ: Thou loving, all-atoning Lamb, Thee—by thy painful agony, Thy bloody sweat, thy grief and shame, Thy cross, and passion on the tree, Thy precious death and life—I pray, Take all, take all my sins away! This is a clear echo of ‘By thine agony and bloody sweat; by thy Cross and Passion; by thy precious death and burial . . . ’ but Charles Wesley transforms the original prayer by enclosing it within a structure that emphasizes, in the first and last verses especially, the saving power of Christ and the loving mercy of God. The first verse begins Would Jesus have the sinner die? Why hangs he then on yonder tree? What means that strange expiring cry? This is to counter one question with two others, both of which are rhetorical, and affirm the place of the Passion in the scheme of redemptive


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action; and in the final verse, the hymn ends with a prayer for redeeming love: O let thy love my heart constrain, Thy love for every sinner free, That every fallen soul of man May taste the grace that found out me; That all mankind with me may prove Thy sovereign, everlasting love. Thus the phrases from the Litany are carried within a structure which emphasizes the Redemption; it is as though the penitence of Ash Wednesday is surrounded by the assurance of Good Friday and Easter Day. Similarly, in ‘Out of the deep I cry’ (a first line taken from Psalm 130 in the Book of Common Prayer version), the reference to the Litany is intersected with phrases which remind the reader of the love of God and the ransoming of souls: Thy love is all my plea, Thy Passion speaks for me! By thy pangs and bloody sweat, By thy depth of grief unknown, Save me, grasping at thy feet! Save, O save thy ransomed one! This passage from the Litany is used on several occasions, sometimes with an assurance of God's saving power in Christ Jesus, and sometimes in prayer and penitence. In both kinds of hymn Charles Wesley uses the passage from the Litany to add vigour and realism to his sense of the price to be paid in suffering. Thus in ‘Thou Man of griefs, remember me’, which appears in the 1780Collection in the section ‘For Believers Convinced of Backsliding’, the first verse begins without any of the confidence of the questions in ‘Would Jesus have the sinner die?’: Thou Man of griefs, remember me, Who never canst thyself forget! Thy last, mysterious agony, Thy fainting pangs, and bloody sweat! The balance between penitence and thankfulness in the hymns which include echoes from the Litany is even more marked in the hymns which are concerned with the Holy Communion. Most of these are to be found in Hymns on the Lord's Supper (1745). In this case, however, the intertextuality is complicated by an intermediate influence, Dr Daniel Brevint's The Christian Sacrament and Sacrifice.347 Brevint was an Anglican divine of the seventeenth century, whose work was published in 1673: it was one of a

347

For the text, and a commentary on the hymns, see J. Ernest Rattenbury, The Eucharistic Hymns of John and Charles Wesley (London, 1948).

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number of devotional texts which John Wesley admired, and abridged so that it could be distributed to his followers. There are certain hymns which are directly related to moments in the Service, such as ‘Meet and right it is to sing’, which has its origin in ‘It is very meet, right, and our bounden duty, that we should at all times, and in all places, give thanks unto thee, O Lord . . . ’; this relationship between certain Wesley hymns and the various stages of the liturgy from the Book of Common Prayer has been helpfully studied recently by Kathryn Nichols, and her article shows clearly the way in which Charles Wesley's hymns are not only related to specific phrases in the Prayer Book, but are also thematically related to stages in the service such as the Exhortation and the Confession.348 One example is a hymn that is better known outside Methodism than within it, because it was included in the second edition of Hymns Ancient and Modern (1875): Author of life divine, Who hast a table spread, Furnished with mystic wine And everlasting bread, Preserve the life thyself hast given, And feed and train us up for heaven. Our needy souls sustain With fresh supplies of love, Till all thy life we gain, And all thy fullness prove, And, strengthened by thy perfect grace, Behold without a veil thy face. This hymn is associated with the two alternative prayers after Communion, especially in verse 1 with the second prayer: ‘ . . . we most heartily thank thee, for that thou dost vouchsafe to feed us, who have duly received these holy mysteries, with the spiritual food of the most precious Body and Blood of thy Son, our Saviour Jesus Christ; . . . ’ and in verse 2 with the first prayer: ‘And here we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, ourselves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and lively sacrifice unto thee; humbly beseeching thee, that all we, who are partakers of this holy Communion, may be fulfilled with thy grace and heavenly benediction . . . ’. But the hymn is also based on the following passage from Brevint: And as bread and wine keep up our natural life, so doth our Lord Jesus, by a continual supply of strength and grace, represented by bread and wine, sustain that spiritual life which He hath procured by His cross—

348

Kathryn Nichols, ‘Charles Wesley's Eucharistic Hymns: Their Relationship to the Book of Common Prayer’, The Hymn, 39/2 (April, 1988), 12–21. For a full discussion of John Wesley's treatment of the Book of Common Prayer and his attitude towards it, see Frank Baker, John Wesley and the Church of England (London, 1970), 234–55.


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Once again it is noticeable that Charles Wesley takes these antecedent passages and transforms them. He uses the principal metaphor of feeding from the Prayer Book service, but he deliberately develops the reference to the ‘spiritual life’ of which Brevint speaks: the hymn becomes a true exploration of the holy mysteries, because those mysteries lead the Christian to life and to heaven. The first line, ‘Author of life divine’, anticipates the other references to life, and it is made clear that such life leads ultimately to the fullness of Christ and the joy of heaven. The partaking of Holy Communion is the receiving of ‘fresh supplies of love’, as if from some celestial quartermaster whose store is always open and whose table is forever spread; and that love leads to life, to the administration of perfect grace, and to heaven itself. At other times, Charles Wesley is dramatic, as he is in another Communion hymn, ‘Jesu, we thus obey’, in which the participants ‘come to meet’ their Lord, and suddenly, it seems, the Lord is present with them: And lo! the Lamb, the Crucified, The sinners' friend, is come! The hymns which are influenced by the Order of Service for Holy Communion show Charles Wesley's ability to give shape and point to the original wording, to bring out its hidden significance. His treatment of the psalms is similar, although he is closer to Isaac Watts here in his practice of giving a New Testament significance to Old Testament material. He had subscribed to Article VII of the Thirty-Nine Articles on becoming a priest: ‘The Old Testament is not contrary to the New: for both in the Old and New Testament everlasting life is offered to Mankind by Christ, who is the only Mediator between God and Man, being both God and Man. . . . ’ So Charles Wesley takes Psalm 48 and boldly alters it in the very first line. The psalm begins: Great is the Lord, and highly to be praised: in the city of our God, even upon his holy hill. The hill of Sion is a fair place, and the joy of the whole earth: upon the north-side lieth the city of the great King; God is well known in her palaces as a sure refuge. Charles Wesley turns this into robust verse, in a rather unusual 7.6.7.6.7.7.7.6. metre, which gives an additional weight at a crucial point in the second half of the verse: Great is our redeeming Lord In power, and truth, and grace; Him, by highest heaven adored, His church on earth doth praise.

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In the city of our God, In his holy mount below, Publish, spread his name abroad, And all his greatness show. The insertion of ‘redeeming’ in line 1 transforms the traditional imagery which comes after it. Similarly, in the last verse, the psalmist's ‘For this God is our God for ever and ever: he shall be our guide unto death’ is given an entirely new pattern of meaning: Zion's God is all our own, Who on his love rely; We his pardoning love have known, And live to Christ, and die. To the new Jerusalem He our faithful guide shall be: Him we claim, and rest in him, Through all eternity. It is now the love of God which is presented, the pardoning love in Christ Jesus. It is this love which penetrates the whole being of the Christian: ‘For whether we live, we live unto the Lord; and whether we die, we die unto the Lord: whether we live therefore, or die, we are the Lord's’ (Romans 14: 8). The psalms were an expression of many different moods, and therefore of interest to a writer such as Charles Wesley. Elements of his phraseology, such as ‘the Lord is King’ (Psalm 99: 1), or ‘out of the deep’ (Psalm 130: 1), or ‘open my eyes that I may see’ (Psalm 119: 18), emerge quite naturally from the mind of one who had been accustomed to singing the psalms from childhood. At other times, his poet's love of unusual vocabulary delights in words such as ‘minished’ (Psalm 12: 1, hymn 16 in 1780). He also extracted homely words from the psalms, such as ‘simpleness’, from Psalm 69: 5, ‘God, thou knowest my simpleness and my faults are not hid from thee’. This becomes (in an address to Jesus): Whom man forsakes thou wilt not leave, Ready the outcasts to receive, Though all my simpleness I own And all my faults to thee are known. A phrase such as ‘the fierceness of man shall turn to thy praise: and the fierceness of them shalt thou refrain’ (Psalm 76: 10) is the source of a ‘Hymn for the Kingswood Colliers’, beginning ‘Glory to God, whose sovereign grace’, written in the early years of the Methodist revival and published in 1740. At the end of the hymn that verse from the psalm is given an authentic but lurid eighteenth-century actuality:


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Suffice that for the season past Hell's horrid language filled our tongues, We all thy words behind us cast, And lewdly sang the drunkard's songs. But, Oh! the power of grace divine! In hymns we now our voices raise, Loudly in strange hosannas join, And blasphemies are turned to praise! This is an example of the way in which a phrase from a psalm may be used to end a hymn. More often it provides the initial impulse, the starting point for a searching meditation or a profound development: I will hearken what the Lord Will say concerning me! Hast thou not a gracious word For one that waits on thee? This comes from Psalm 85: 8: ‘I will hearken what the Lord God will say concerning me: for he shall speak peace unto his people, and to his saints, that they turn not again.’ As so often, Charles Wesley takes the second part of this verse and gives it a New Testament significance: Speak it to my soul, that I May in thee have peace and power, Never from my Saviour fly, And never grieve thee more. The same thing happens with another opening, from Psalm 99: 1: ‘The Lord is King, be the people never so impatient: he sitteth between the cherubims, be the earth never so unquiet.’ The hymn follows the psalm quite closely in verse 1, but then switches abruptly to a phrase from Matthew 28: 18: The Lord is king, and earth submits, Howe'er impatient, to his sway; Between the cherubim he sits, And makes his restless foes obey. All power is to our Jesus given; O'er earth's rebellious sons he reigns; He mildly rules the hosts of heaven, And holds the powers of hell in chains. As with the psalms, there are phrases in the Collects which enter Charles Wesley's mind spontaneously and naturally, and are part of his poetic resources. These include ‘Pardon and peace in Jesus find’ (1780: 4, from Trinity 21) and ‘Thou hatest all iniquity | But nothing thou hast made’ (1780: 262, from Ash Wednesday), or ‘Thou didst the meek example leave |

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That I might in thy footsteps tread’ (1780: 321, from Easter 2). However, the influence of the Collects is greater than these individual examples suggest, if only because one of the recurring structural patterns in them is that of a prayer for good conduct on earth followed by the hope of an everlasting life in heaven. It is found in ‘And let our bodies part’, where the fifth verse is as follows: O let our heart and mind Continually ascend, That haven of repose to find Where all our labours end! This comes from the Collect for Ascension Day:‘ . . . so we may also in heart and mind thither ascend, and with him continually dwell, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end . . . ’. Similarly the hymn ‘Ye faithful souls who Jesus know’ is a tissue of biblical ideas interwoven on a design from the Collects for Ascension Day and the Sunday following: Ye faithful souls who Jesus know, If risen indeed with him ye are, Superior to the joys below, His resurrection's power declare. The verses which follow are related to the Collect for the Sunday after Ascension Day: O God the King of glory, who hast exalted thine only Son Jesus Christ with great triumph unto thy kingdom in heaven; We beseech thee, leave us not comfortless; but send to us thine Holy Ghost to comfort us, and exalt us unto the same place whither our Saviour Christ is gone before, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen. The crucial words here are ‘glory’ and ‘exalted’, which underpin verses 2 and 3: Your faith by holy tempers prove, By actions show your sins forgiven! And seek the glorious things above, And follow Christ your Head to heaven! There your exalted Saviour see, Seated at God's right hand again, In all his Father's majesty, In everlasting pomp to reign. The phrase, ‘in heart and mind thither ascend, and with him continually dwell’, from the Collect for Ascension Day itself, occurs in verse 4: To him continually aspire, Contending for your native place;


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And emulate the angel choir, And only live to love and praise. These Ascension-tide Collects are of particular importance to Charles Wesley, because they help to release his verse into its most visionary and exalted descriptions of heaven. But that theme is balanced, as it is here, by an equally vigorous moral and pastoral concern, by the requirements of Christian behaviour: Your faith by holy tempers prove, By actions show your sins forgiven! The action which John and Charles Wesley were most deeply engaged in throughout the years following their conversion in 1738 was the revival of the Church of England (not the separation from it). They saw themselves as breathing new life into a decaying and feeble body, and the Collect for the Twenty-fifth Sunday after Trinity was a crisp expression of their aim: Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people; that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may of thee be plenteously rewarded; through Jesus Christ our Lord. In view of the course of their lives, it is not surprising that the phrase ‘stir up’ should occur on several occasions in Charles Wesley's hymns. One example is ‘Stir up thy strength, almighty Lord’. Another occurrence is in a hymn on prayer, ‘Jesu, thou sovereign Lord of all’: Pour out thy supplicating grace, And stir us up to seek thy face! The most celebrated example, however, is from ‘O thou who camest from above’: Still let me guard the holy fire, And still stir up thy gift in me; which emphasizes Wesley's energies and desires, and also his insistence on a personal religion. In the particular hermeneutics which Wesley applies to the Book of Common Prayer we can therefore see his theology set forth. The same applies to his use of non-scriptural sources, such as hymns and poems.

Hymns and Sacred Poems Charles Wesley frequently makes use of previous hymn-writers in his work, either taking over what they have written, or adding to it. His alterations or developments of the texts which he has appropriated often demonstrate the particular characteristics of his religious thought. His enthusiasm, for example, is shown in his use of Isaac Watts, who writes:

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Begin, my tongue, some heavenly theme, Awake, my voice, and sing— Charles Wesley multiplies this a thousandfold: O for a thousand tongues to sing— There are probably other sources for this line,349 but the end-product sharpens in force if it is seen as a development of Watt's restrained dignity. Another example is found in Wesley's ‘Thy ceaseless, unexhausted love’: Thy goodness and thy truth to me, To every soul abound, A vast, unfathomable sea, Where all our thoughts are drowned. This comes from Watts's paraphrase of Psalm 147, ‘Praise ye the Lord! 'tis good to raise’: His wisdom's vast, and knows no bound, A deep where all our thoughts are drowned! Watts drowns in God's wisdom; Wesley in his goodness and truth, manifested to him and to every soul. A similar heightening of tension is found in Wesley's treatment of Watts's Time, like an ever-rolling stream, Bears all its sons away; They fly forgotten, as a dream Dies at the opening day. In Wesley's treatment, the same image is made more urgent: Our life is a dream, Our time as a stream Glides swiftly away, And the fugitive moment refuses to stay. The first line may be an echo of Shakespeare's The Tempest (‘We are such stuff | As dreams are made on’), but the rest is Watts, made more urgent and taut by the metre, short lines followed by a long one; but Watts's fading dream is changed into the ‘fugitive moment’, a flying second which ‘refuses to stay’, as if the human being, fearing death, were pleading for time to stand still. The restraint of Watts is challenged again when ‘They fly forgotten’ is superseded by Wesley's brilliant metrical effect:

349

The most commonly suggested source is a Moravian hymn. See Watson and Trickett, Companion to Hymns and Psalms, note to hymn 744.


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The arrow is flown, The moment is gone; The millennial year Rushes on to our view, and eternity's here. Not only is there more urgency: the context is different. While Watts's theme is ‘Man frail and God eternal’, Wesley's is the parable of the talents, with the servant having to give an account of his work, not at some far-off time but (in the rapidity of years) in the twinkling of an eye. In Watts the idea is used to describe the greatness of God; in Wesley the verse is concerned with the need to make the most of time in the journey which we are pursuing. Watts's hymn points towards the grandeur of the divine: Wesley's towards human responsibility. His Christ-centred theology is shown in the change from Thomas Ken's ‘Praise God from whom all blessings flow’ to ‘Christ, from whom all blessings flow’; and other seventeenth-century hymn-writers from whom he borrows include Samuel Crossman (who in turn borrowed from George Herbert) and John Mason. Mason used an early Christian phrase to make the line ‘My Lord, my Love was crucified’ in his Spiritual Songs of 1683; Wesley uses it as the last line of a hymn based on Lamentations 1: 12, ‘O Love Divine, what hast thou done!’. Characteristically, Wesley changes Mason to the present tense, and emphasizes the paradox of the Crucifixion (an idea he would have found in Herbert's ‘The Sacrifice’): The immortal God for me hath died! My Lord, my Love is crucified— Equally significant is his rewriting of Crossman in one of the Hymns for the Lord's Supper (1745), ‘God of unexampled grace’. In the final verse of ‘My song is love unknown’, Crossman has the lines Never was love, dear King, Never was grief like thine! The second of these comes from Herbert's ‘The Sacrifice’, in which every verse has the refrain (again from Lamentations 1: 12) ‘Was ever grief like mine’. Acting on Crossman's hint, Wesley celebrates the redemptive suffering: Jesus, Lord, what hast thou done? Publish we the death divine, Stop, and gaze, and fall, and own Was never love like thine! In the last line ‘grief ’ has turned into ‘love’, to emphasize not the suffering so much as the saving love behind it.

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At another time, Wesley can change not the vocabulary so much as the metre. He borrows from Addison, who writes a ‘prospect poem’ of the view of God's mercies: When all thy mercies, O my God, My rising soul surveys, Transported with the view, I'm lost In wonder, love, and praise. This is Addison's first verse. Wesley reserves it for the end of ‘Love divine, all loves excelling’ to make a climax: and by placing the word ‘Lost’ at the beginning of the line, it acquires a force and surprise: Changed from glory into glory, Till in heaven we take our place, Till we cast our crowns before thee, Lost in wonder, love, and praise. The last words are the same, but the transformation is astonishing. Addison has been calmly surveying God's mercies, and ‘lost’ appears to be a pleasant sensation, in which he is agreeably pleased by the variety and abundance of the view. Wesley is writing of a ‘new creation’ of a heaven in which to be lost involves a complete surrender of the self in glory and in the adoration of divine love. Another way of varying the original is (as in the biblical intertextuality) to turn the original narrative into metaphor. In Milton's Samson Agonistes there are the poignant lines in which Samson speaks of his blindness: O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon, Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse Without all hope of day! (80–2) In ‘When, gracious Lord, when shall it be’, Wesley uses the famous repetition to describe the state of the soul: A poor, blind child I wander here, If haply I may feel thee near; O dark! dark! dark! (I still must say) Amid the blaze of gospel-day. The quotation is a particularly obvious one: but Wesley is reading the original, which is about Samson's physical blindness, as metaphor, appropriating the text for his own purposes and encouraging not only a new reading but a new way of reading.

Sacred and Profane Love The expression of divine love is often achieved by the use of biblical imagery, but Wesley also takes over secular images and uses them to


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indicate the love of God. One example is ‘Love divine, all loves excelling’, in which that first line deliberately contrasts divine love with all (earthly) loves. It was written as a Christian replacement for the song in Purcell's King Arthur, with libretto by Dryden: Fairest Isle, all isles excelling, Seat of pleasures, and of loves; Venus here will choose her dwelling, And forsake her Cyprian groves. Clearly the pleasures and loves are of an earthly kind. The British Isles will be so attractive to lovers, that Venus will move from Cyprus to live there. Wesley's response is to pray for divine love to ‘Fix in us thy humble dwelling’, and it is the dwelling in the human heart that is the structuring principle of the hymn. Venus is superseded by Christ, dwelling in the human heart (as, in ‘God of unexampled grace’, Jesus is ‘the true eternal Pan’, the God of all things, worshipped as Pan by the Greek shepherds but known to us as Jesus).350 Wesley is writing against an original text, and a knowledge of that text sharpens a sense of what he is doing. Another example of this is from Paradise Lost, where in Book IV Eve is speaking to Adam: With thee conversing I forget all time, All seasons and their change, all please alike (IV. 639–40) This becomes, in Wesley's ‘Saviour who ready art to hear’: With thee conversing I forget All time, and toil, and care Eve is speaking the language of love to another mortal: Wesley takes the speech over and uses it for God, cleverly reworking Milton into a new metre. Wesley may be using the same words, but he is placing them in different contexts, and by so doing he underlines the importance of those codes or contexts. An example is the borrowing from Matthew Prior's Solomon, published in 1718, in ‘Jesu, lover of my soul’, where Wesley uses the phrase ‘While the nearer waters roll’. This is from Book II of Solomon:

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I suspect that the writer from whom these images come is Ovid. ‘Fix in us thy humble dwelling’ may well refer back to the beautiful story of Baucis and Philemon in Metamorphoses, VIII. 611 ff., the legend which describes Jupiter and Mercury wandering on the earth (‘to earth come down’) and finding the houses of the wealthy closed to them: ‘tamen una recepit | parva quidem, stipulis et canna tecta palustri’ (‘still one house received them, humble indeed, thatched with straw and reeds from the marsh’—Loeb Library translation). Writers who see Jesus as Pan include Spenser (The Shepheardes Calender, April) and Milton (On the Morning of Christ's Nativity ). See J. R. Watson, ‘Hymns on the Lord's Supper, 1745, and some Literary and Liturgical Sources’, paper given to the Charles Wesley Society (1995), in Proceedings of the Society, forthcoming.

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We weave the Chaplet, and We crown the Bowl; And smiling see the nearer Waters roll; (II. 537–8) Prior's poem is about the vanity of human wishes. In Book II Solomon, who is tired of riches and luxury, turns to love. He falls in love with the servant Abra, but finds that he rapidly becomes a slave to passion. He reflects on the dangers of yielding to temptation, and the insidious movement from pleasure to something more dangerous. The passage needs to be quoted in full: On Pleasure's flowing Brink We idly stray, Masters as yet of our returning Way: Seeing no Danger, We disarm our Mind; And give our Conduct to the Waves and Wind: Then in the flow'ry Mead, or verdant Shade To wanton Dalliance negligently laid, We weave the Chaplet, and We crown the Bowl; And smiling see the nearer Waters roll; 'Till the strong Gusts of raging Passion rise; 'Till the dire Tempest mingles Earth and Skies; And swift into the boundless Ocean borne, Our foolish Confidence too late We mourn: Round our devoted Heads the Billows beat; And from our troubl'd View the lessen'd Lands retreat. The context of Prior's phrase reveals the full import of Wesley's hymn. Jesus is to be the lover of his soul in contrast to the temptations of earthly passion, and Wesley knows how dangerous these are. The ‘dire Tempest’ is the tempest of Wesley's fourth line: and the soul at sea prays to come home to harbour (‘Safe into the haven guide’). Solomon feels that the soul drifts, and loses sight of land, lost in the boundless ocean. For Prior, love is ‘mighty Love’: O mighty Love! from thy unbounded Pow'r How shall the human Bosom rest secure? The human bosom, in Wesley's hymn, flies to the bosom of the Saviour; and Prior's sense of the destructive nature of the many different shapes of love is countered by Wesley's Thou, O Christ, art all I want, More than all in thee I find. This vision of a single satisfaction (on which the ‘single eye’ is properly fixed) is the principal point of the hymn. It is Jesus who is the ‘lover’ of the soul, and he only; earthly passions are supplanted by heavenly ones. The same transition from profane to sacred is found in Wesley's ‘Captain of Israel's host and guide’, which again uses Prior. Instead of Prior's ‘mighty


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Love’, Wesley ends the hymn with ‘love, almighty love’; and the line which precedes it, As far from danger as from fear is taken from a witty poem by Prior, ‘To a Lady: She refusing to continue a Dispute with me, and leaving me in the Argument’. The poem turns the situation into a decorous compliment: You, far from Danger as from Fear, Might have sustain'd an open Fight: For seldom your opinions err; Your Eyes are always in the right— The borrowing here is aggressive, and intentionally so: Charles Wesley takes Prior's line and deliberately obliterates its original purpose. Who wants flirtation with a society lady when he can have ‘love, almighty love’? Similarly in ‘And can it be’ he takes over a line from Pope's Eloisa to Abelard, describing Eloisa's illicit love: Thy eyes diffused a reconciling ray, And beams of glory brightened all the day. (145–6) Wesley turns this into Thine eye diffus'd a quick'ning ray (1780: 193) where the alteration from ‘reconciling’ to ‘quick'ning’ is striking and effective: this is an eye that brings life, quickens in the new birth. But even more remarkable, perhaps, is the way in which Wesley has taken the words out of context, and reversed the direction of Pope's art. One of the most powerful features of Eloisa to Abelard is the way in which Pope portrays Eloisa using religious language to describe the ecstasy of her love for Abelard; Wesley joyfully snatches back her phrases, and offers them to God again. She longs for a state in which she would be free, ‘mistress to the man I love’: All then is full, possessing and possest, No craving Void left aking in the breast;—(93–4) which becomes, in Wesley, the longing for the spirit of God: No good thing in me resides, My soul is all an aching void Till my Spirit here abides, And I am filled with God. She thinks of Abelard in her dreams, and in the evenings: Far other dreams my erring soul employ, Far other raptures, of unholy joy: When at the close of each sad, sorrowing day,

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Fancy restores what vengeance snatch'd away, Then conscience sleeps, and leaving nature free, All my loose soul unbounded springs to thee. (223–8) In her dreams, Eloisa has sexual fantasies: Provoking Daemons all restraint remove, And stir within me ev'ry source of love. I hear thee, view thee, gaze o'er all thy charms, And round thy phantom glue my clasping arms. I wake—no more I hear, no more I view, The phantom flies me, as unkind as you. I call aloud; it hears not what I say; I stretch my empty arms; it glides away: To dream once more I close my willing eyes; Ye soft illusions, dear deceits, arise! (231–40) Wesley uses this for an evening hymn, ‘Omnipresent God, whose aid’, which is a direct response to Eloisa's fantasizing: Omnipresent God, whose aid No one ever asked in vain, Be this night about my bed, Every evil thought restrain; Lay thy hand upon my soul, God of my unguarded hours, All my enemies control, Hell and earth and nature's powers. ‘Nature's powers’ are precisely what give Eloisa her problems. Wesley prays for ‘dreams divine’, and in verse 4 turns Eloisa's sleeping and waking into a different pattern, borrowing the ‘unfettered soul’ from Pope: Loose me from the chains of sense, Set me from the body free; Draw with stronger influence My unfettered soul to thee! In me, Lord, thyself reveal, Fill me with a sweet surprise; Let me thee when waking feel, Let me in thine image rise. Eloisa, unhappily, wakens ‘to all the griefs I left behind’ (248). In her passionate state, she still recognizes the virtues of her fellow nuns, with their Desires compos'd, affections ever ev'n, Tears that delight, and sighs that waft to heav'n (213–14) which in Wesley's ‘Sinners, obey the gospel word’ becomes The tears that tell your sins forgiven; The sighs that waft your souls to heaven;


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but Eloisa's cry is not for God but for Abelard: Come thou, my father, brother, husband, friend! (152) which Wesley turns back to God in ‘Jesu, my Saviour, Brother, Friend’. The conflict between Eloisa's position as a nun and her love for Abelard makes Pope's poem a powerful and deeply moving study of passion. Wesley not only takes over phrases from the poem, but in so doing he invests his own relationship to God with the same kind of passionate intensity. The hymns which are written upon Pope's text, or over against it, gain tremendous force in their emphasis upon divine love and human longing from their parodic relationship to his study of earthly love.

Intertextuality and Doctrine In his journal for 1754, Charles Wesley speaks of ‘once more transcribing Dr Young's Night Thoughts. No writings but the inspired are more useful to me.’351 Why he was transcribing Night Thoughts ‘once more’ is not clear, but the fact that he found the poem ‘useful’, more so than anything except the Bible, is evidence of his way of working and of his close attention to the works of others. The particular value of Night Thoughts, which was published in various sections or ‘Nights’ between 1742 and 1749, lay in its treatment of many of the issues which interested and moved the Wesleys. They approved of it, as Stephen Cornford has suggested, ‘because it stressed the depravity of man and the reality of the supernatural—highly congenial to enthusiastic Christianity’;352 and because Young's poem was a sacred one, ‘One Life, Death, & Immortality’ as the subtitle says, Wesley did not need to subvert the text as he had done with Pope's Eloisa to Abelard and Prior's ‘To a Lady’. What Young, in the final ‘Night XI’, described as ‘the warm Imagination’ (IX. 1566) suited Wesley; so did Young's enthusiastic style, full of question marks and exclamations: How poor? how rich? how abject? how august? How complicat? how wonderful is Man?— An Heir of Glory! a frail Child of Dust! Helpless Immortal! Insect infinite! A Worm! a God! (1.67–8, 78–80) The last phrases are found in ‘God of almighty love’, from Hymns and Sacred Poems, 1749: My feeble mind transform And, perfectly renewed, Into a saint exalt a worm— A worm exalt to God!

351

Journals of Charles Wesley, ed. Jackson, ii. 106.

352

Edward Young, Night Thoughts, ed. Stephen Cornford (Cambridge, 1989), 8. All quotations are from this edition.

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Young's idea, in ‘Night I’, that this world is a preparation for the next, but that it is also tempting in its attractions, is close to Wesley's. Young writes How sad a sight is human Happiness To those whose thought can pierce beyond an Hour? (1. 306–7) and Wesley's continual theme is the happiness of heaven— O happy, happy place, Where saints and angels meet! and he borrows from Young's ‘Night IV’ the idea of the happy day: O happy, happy day That calls thy exiles home! which comes from Young's Happy Day! that breaks our Chain; That manumits; that calls from Exile home; (IV. 666–7) It is this happiness which leads Charles Wesley to rejoice in the death of his brothers and sisters in Christ, and to await the Day of Judgement with confidence. One hymn in the section of the 1780Collection entitled ‘Describing Judgment’ also echoes Young in ‘Night VI’: If so decreed, th'Allmighty Will be done. Let Earth dissolve, yon ponderous Orbs descend, And grind us into Dust: The Soul is safe; The Man emerges; mounts above the wreck, As tow'ring Flame from Nature's funeral Pyre; (VI. 744–8) which becomes in Wesley a far more vigorous statement, with a springy metre that transforms Young's dullness into bright excitement: Stand th'omnipotent decree! Jehovah's will be done! Nature's end we wait to see, And hear her final groan. Let this earth dissolve, and blend In death the wicked and the just; Let those pond'rous orbs descend, And grind us into dust. Rests secure the righteous man! At his Redeemer's beck Sure t'emerge, and rise again, And mount above the wreck.


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Lo! the heavenly Spirit towers, Like flames, o'er nature's funeral pyre, Triumphs in immortal powers, And claps his wings of fire! For both Young and Wesley, the contrast between transient earthly joys and heavenly happiness was important, and the modern editors of the 1780Collection have pointed to a whole hymn which is under the influence of Young in carrying this idea, ‘A thousand oracles divine’. This was one of Young's themes which Wesley would have found congenial. Another was the subject of ‘Night II’, the proper use and value of time, and ‘Night VI’, which dealt with ‘the Infidel Reclaim'd’. Also significant in Night Thoughts is the speaker's challenge to his silent figure Lorenzo to use reason properly, instead of employing ‘Insolence, and Impotence of Thought’ (VII. 1342). Young believed that Deism, properly exposed to the Gospel, would lead to Christian ends, and allow the fullness of belief: Life immortal strikes Conviction, in a Flood of Light Divine (VII. 1352–3) The trust is in reason modified by an inspiration coming from above: it is a contribution to the debate about reason which Wesley refers to in ‘Author of faith, eternal Word’: The things unknown to feeble sense, Unseen by reason's glimmering ray, With strong commanding evidence Their heavenly origin display. The word ‘glimmering’, as James Dale has pointed out, is found in Milton (Paradise Lost, II. 1037) and in Pope;353 and the phrase ‘reason's glimmering ray’ (or ‘light’) was a cliché of the time. It appears in Dryden's Religio Laici and in Matthew Prior's ‘On Exodus iii. 14’, as we have seen. Wesley is aligning himself with two distinguished poets; he distrusts human reason alone, as Dryden did, and his own preference is for a combination of knowledge and feeling— My God! I know, I feel thee mine as Young asks Lorenzo—‘dost Thou feel these Arguments’ (VII. 968). Wesley's stress on feeling is part of his selfawareness, the pervasive ‘I’ of his experiencing self; and it is this experiencing self which is found throughout Night Thoughts, as Young argues for a humanity ennobled by its sense of the divine.

353

A Collection of Hymns, ed. Hildebrandt and Beckerlegge, 40–1.

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When it is seen properly, Young argues, the ordering of things needs no explanation: ‘All, All is Right, by God ordain'd or done’ (IX. 374). He is echoing Pope, in the Essay on Man: ‘One truth is clear, “Whatever is, is right”.’ (1. 294). Wesley uses this cosmic Toryism rather differently: Lord, we thy will obey, And in thy pleasure rest We, only we, can say, ‘Whatever is, is best’— Joyful to meet, willing to part, Convinced we still are one in heart. This comes from Hymns and Sacred Poems, 1749, so it is unlikely to have been influenced by Young's final ‘Night’, which was published in that year; but it refers back to Pope, and perhaps to Milton, in Samson Agonistes: All is best, though oft we doubt What th'unsearchable dispose Of highest wisdom brings about,— (1745–7) Wesley called the hymn ‘At Parting’, and it was included in the 1780Collection as the first in the section ‘For the Society, Parting’; so the ‘We, only we, can say’ indicates a special relationship with each other and with a certain conviction—whatever is, is best, for us, whether we meet or part, because we are one. The same variation on a specific tradition of eighteenth-century thought is found in Wesley's use of the word ‘charms’. As we have seen, the word has a particular significance for Doddridge and Bishop Berkeley:now Wesley takes the word back towards an earlier meaning of magic: Jesus, the Name that charms our fears That bids our sorrows cease— which uses the name of Jesus as a charm to ward off evil, not as an attraction. John Wesley, who believed in witchcraft and wished that others did (as a counter to Deism) would have understood that Charles was invoking the holy name as a talisman. Words such as ‘feel’ and ‘charms’ have a particular significance for Wesley, because he picks them up from the writings of others and reuses them with a precision that defines his doctrinal position. To them we may add the words which are associated with money and mercantilism: And can it be, that I should gain An interest . . . Come quickly, gracious Lord, and take Possession of thine own!


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These images are associated with the biblical narratives concerning stewardship and land-owning, and to that extent they are to be expected as part of Charles Wesley's intricate use of the Bible. But they also have a particular relevance in an age of bourgeois capitalism, in which spiritual prosperity could often be seen as going hand in hand with material wealth. The parable of the talents was of particular importance to this doctrine, and we find Charles Wesley using it: Father into thy hands alone I have my all restored: My all thy property I own, The steward of the Lord. Once again the narrative becomes metaphor; but choice of this narrative, and the vocabulary of property and interest, indicates Wesley's preoccupation with his spiritual capital: All my treasure is above; All my riches is thy love. Who the worth of love can tell Infinite, unsearchable! The imagery here is associated with that mercantile spirit which is the basis of a book such as Robinson Crusoe, in which the individual calculates his assets and debits on the island as if in a bank, and whose prudent conduct and happy outcome is an example to men of energy and thrift. Wesley's investment in the heavenly treasure, and his dutiful stewardship of that which is entrusted to him—his immortal soul—are examples of a spiritual proceeding which has much in common with the rise of bourgeois individualism and capitalism.354

Charles Wesley's Art In many respects, Charles Wesley's art depends upon the intertextuality which has already been discussed. Its principal feature is the richness of reference, and the fullness of doctrine which is compacted into the stanzas, and that is made possible not only by the use of other writers, but also by the way in which their words and phrases are so skilfully used, either entire or in an altered form. They are accommodated into the lines, and the lines into the verses, by an art which often makes them precise, absolutely right

354

Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719, has a central character who is a characteristic type of individual enterprise and the prudent use of gifts. At one point (Penguin edn., ed. Angus Ross, London, 1965, 83–4) Crusoe surveys his situation as if it were a balance sheet. It is worth nothing in this context that John Wesley translated a Paul Gerhardt hymn: ‘My Saviour, how shall I proclaim, | How pay the mighty debt I owe?’ and that debtors do not usually proclaim the fact that they owe money.

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for the point which they are to make, enriched and enriching by the context in which they are found. In the broadest sense, these borrowings become a part of Charles Wesley's potent rhetoric. In the old sense of rhetoric, these hymns ‘persuade’, and this is in part owing to the skill with which he deploys the figures and phrases in them: and there is no doubt that he was an accomplished rhetorician in the sense of being able to use the techniques of writing that were taught in schools and universities from the Renaissance onwards. Frank Baker has studied these with attention;355 he has also pointed out that Charles Wesley would have studied the writing of Greek and Latin verse, and would have acquired a craftsman's training in the correct use of figures of speech, versification, and poetic structure. Wesley's knowledge of English poetry was remarkable, as we have seen; but he acquired from Milton, Dryden, and Pope not only doctrine and appropriate phrases, but an awareness of their skill in different metre and verse-form. The result is a hymnody which seems purposive, articulate, expressing what it wants to say in a form which allows it to persuade as fully as possible. Professor Baker has also studied the use of stanza forms in Wesley's hymns, noting that he preferred to have more than four lines to work with, and that ‘he not only doubled the 88.8.88.8 metre, but even the already doubled Short Metre (6.6.8.6) so as to make a stanza of sixteen lines’.356 Within those longer stanza forms several features have been observed: the preference for anapaestic metres over iambic pentameters, the use of parison (contrasting parallels, such as ‘fightings without, and fears within’), and chiasmus. To these balancing elements, Baker adds the presence of the epigrammatic, quoting Donald Davie (who in turn is using Ezra Pound) and the idea of ‘scenario’—‘so arranging the circumstance that some perfectly simple speech, perception, dogmatic statement appears in abnormal vigour’.357 The vocabulary, stress, and syntax join to produce what Davie has felicitously called ‘articulate energy’; and elsewhere he has noted the precision and classical purity of Wesley's vocabulary. He notes the absolute precision and weight of This man receiveth sinners still and the astonishing verve of Wesley's paradoxes (which, he says, should ‘leave us gasping’358): Emptied of his majesty, Of his dazzling glories shorn, Being's source begins to be, And God himself is born!

355

Frank Baker, Charles Wesley's Verse (London, 1964), 54.

356

Ibid.

357

Ibid. 60: from Donald Davie, Purity of Diction in English Verse (rev. edn., London, 1967), 72–3.

358

Donald Davie, Dissentient Voice (Notre Dame, Ind. and London, 1982), 21.


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Davie also describes the ‘threading’ of Latinate words in the weave of Anglo-Saxon ones, and this idea has been taken up and expanded by others. O. A. Beckerlegge has given some notable examples: inextinguishable, antepast, millennial, indissolubly, inalienably, amaranthine.359 These words would be remarkable anywhere, but their placing in Wesley's lines gives them additional force: There let it for thy glory burn With inextinguishable blaze,— Similarly words such as ‘real’ take on a new life: My second, real, living life I then began to live— Come, Holy Ghost, thine influence shed And realize the sign— and a word such as ‘active’ seems so much more vigorous than the expected ‘living’: Author of faith, eternal Word Whose Spirit breathes the active flame,— Or Wesley can use a word such as ‘essential’ in its original sense: Spirit of truth, essential God Where pure, essential joy is found, The Lord's redeemed their heads shall raise, With everlasting gladness crowned And filled with love, and lost in praise. ‘Essential’ here is used in the OED sense 1—‘that is such by essence, or in the absolute or highest sense’. It surprises by taking a word back to its original meaning and using it with precision.360 At times, a whole hymn seems to be written in a certain mode, as though Wesley has slipped into a particular vocabulary and manner. This is the case with some of the excited hymns following the conversion; and in a quieter vein, there is: I want a principle within Of jealous, godly fear, A sensibility of sin, A pain to feel it near. That I from thee no more may part, No more thy goodness grieve,

359

See O. A. Beckerlegge, ‘Charles Wesley's Vocabulary’, London Quarterly Review, 191 (1968), 152–61; and Baker, Charles Wesley's Verse, ch. 5.

360

A good example is John Wesley's use of ‘important’ to describe the Day of Judgement: See Ch. 9 above p. 211.

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The filial awe, the fleshly heart, The tender conscience give. Quick as the apple of an eye, O God, my conscience make;— The words compel attention because they are used in a slightly unusual way—‘I want’ (need), ‘sensibility’ (sensitiveness), ‘fleshly’ (tender), ‘Quick as the apple of an eye’ (sensitive as the pupil—from Psalm 17: 8). The inversion of the second verse is quite common: That I thy mercy may proclaim, That all mankind thy truth may see; Hallow thy great and glorious name, And perfect holiness in me. The anaphora of ‘That . . . That’, which sets up its own rhythm, is balanced by the verbs, ‘Hallow . . . And perfect’. Similarly balanced are the nouns and verbs in the following: Hear him, ye deaf; his praise, ye dumb, Your loosened tongues employ; Ye blind, behold your Saviour come, And leap, ye lame, for joy! The four handicaps—deaf, dumb, blind, lame—are distributed through the verse, with their attendant verbs: verb noun, noun verb, noun verb, verb noun. Wesley is here using Common Metre. In his hands it becomes flexible, often rapid in movement (unlike the Long Metre of ‘God of all power, and truth, and grace’, which is more stately, noble, and reflective) and quite different from the rhyming couplets of the 77.77 metre: Christ, who now gone up on high, Captive leads captivity; While His foes from Him receive Grace that God with men may live. Here the phrase ‘Captive leads captivity’, from Ephesians 4: 8, fits exactly into the second line: it resonates from its new position, and gains a rhythm from the lines above and below. The most spectacular example of this is ‘Hark, how all the welkin rings’, where line after line is precise in the seven syllables: Glory to the new born King— Christ is born in Bethlehem— Jesus, our Immanuel:— The exact accommodation of these reverberant phrases to the line of verse is characteristic of Wesley's skill: the phrases themselves take on new life


259

from their acquired rhythms in the verse, and the verse acquires a celebratory quality. Such placing is crucially important: it allows the verses to have shape and direction, sometimes leading to a specific point: Made perfect first in love, And sanctified by grace, We shall from earth remove, And see his glorious face: His love shall then be fully showed, And man shall all be lost in God. Here the whole verse conducts the reader towards the final phrase, and especially the word ‘lost’ (a word which Wesley uses frequently to describe the state of the soul in heaven). The effect here is that the first four lines serve as preliminary matter for the full statement in the final couplet. The quatrain, ABAB, is followed by a couplet which has a neatness and snap to it that contrasts with the more expansive quatrain. Usually there is a pause between the two, signalled by a colon or semicolon, as in this John Wesley translation: Lord, arm me with thy Spirit's might Since I am called by thy great name; In thee let all my thoughts unite, Of all my works be thou the aim; Thy love attend me all my days, And my sole business be thy praise. The verse uses the pronouns beautifully to express the interaction between man and God, the covenant in which God arms him because he is called, in which God's love attends him and therefore his business is God's praise (a parallel to Herbert's rendering of the twenty-third psalm). Here the pronouns alternate in graceful recognition of each other—me . . . thy, I . . . thy, thee . . . my, thy . . . me . . . my, my . . . thy. And, as so often, the pace of the stanza is dictated by the preponderance of monosyllables and the pauses at the end of lines 2 and 4. Wesley can also make the lines go faster: Stung by the scorpion sin My poor expiring soul The balmy sound drinks in, And is at once made whole. See there my Lord upon the tree! I hear, I feel, he died for me. Here the adjectival clause hurries the reader towards the main verb (held back after the predicate, ‘The balmy sound’), and the speed continues until the full stop after ‘whole’ and the sudden spondee of ‘See there’, followed by the fine deepening effect of ‘I hear, I feel’.

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In these ways Wesley can use six-line verses with great virtuosity and variety. He also handles the eight-line verse form with great skill. The most common eight-line forms are D.S.M., used with choriambic metre for ‘Soldiers of Christ arise’ and other hymns of the church militant, and 8.7.8.7.D., used for ‘Love divine, all loves excelling’. Other variants include 7.6.7.6.7.8.7.6., used for ‘Son of God, if thy free grace’, and 7.7.7.7.D. for ‘What are these arrayed in white?’. And the use of an anapaestic rhythm can give an eight-line stanza an entirely different feel: The Church in her militant state Is weary, and cannot forbear; The saints in an agony wait To see him again in the air. The Spirit invites in the bride Her heavenly Lord to descend And place her, enthroned at his side, In glory that never shall end. The movement here requires a physical response from the reader/singer, a willingness to surrender to the rocking motion of the lines; while the imagery is strangely baroque in its movement and pictorial qualities. The next verse continues: The news of his coming I hear, And join in the catholic cry: O Jesus, in triumph appear, Appear on the clouds of the sky! The imagery is that of a baroque ceiling, or altarpiece: it is evidence of an intensity, which is found partly in this love of bold imagery: Then let us sit beneath his cross, And gladly catch the healing stream and partly in a love of dramatic situations. The hymn ‘O Love divine! what hast thou done!’, from which the last lines come, is a good example: Wesley knows perfectly well what the Saviour has done, but he prefers to emphasize it by striking a dramatic pose and opening with an exclamation. ‘There was something in Charles of the dramatic’, wrote W. F. Lofthouse,361 and this is evident from ‘Where shall my wond'ring soul begin?’ and ‘And can it be’ onwards. It is all part of a technique which is demanding on the reader because it is so full of energetic activity, of rhythms and images that enact Wesley's excitement rather than merely recording it. The most important of them are the physical ones.

361

W. F. Lofthouse, ‘Charles Wesley’, in Rupert Davies and Gordon Rupp (eds.), A History of the Methodist Church in Great Britain (London, 1965), 136.


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The Physicality of Charles Wesley's Hymns Charles Wesley's hymns are forceful because they contain so many words which are physical: for him the life of a Christian was to be experienced in the body as well as the soul. Not only was he brave in the face of rioting and hostility; his moments of enthusiasm were robustly expressed. ‘We sang and shouted all the way to Oxford’, he wrote in his journal for September 1738.362 By the same token his metaphors for the spiritual state are often strong ones: ‘I . . . was quite melted down with God's goodness to my friend’;363 ‘She burst into tears, fell on my neck, and melted me into fervent prayer for her’.364 In the hymns this becomes: And melt at last, O melt me down Into the mould of love. or Melt our spirits down, and mould Into thy perfect love. Melting down is one image for God's power: another is breaking, as in stone-breaking: Strike with the hammer of thy word And break my stubborn heart! One stone-breaking hymn, entitled ‘Written before preaching at Portland’, may have taken its image from the workers quarrying Portland stone, where it is no longer applied to Wesley himself but to his hearers: ‘And break these hearts of stone’.365 The heart, the seat of the affections, was often spoken of by Wesley as ‘enlarged’: ‘I preached at night with enlargement of heart’.366 So in the hymns also it becomes, in quick succession, capable of enlargement, a seat of fire, and a vessel to be filled: Enlarge, inflame, and fill my heart With boundless charity divine! There are physical images everywhere in the hymns: thirst, hunger, fullness, strength, rising up, standing fast, melting down, fighting, shouting, singing. It is part of the way in which Wesley's life as a Christian, and especially as an itinerant preacher, was experienced not only in his preaching but also in his bodily needs. His journal often speaks of tiredness, and hunger, and cold, and of the flux (diarrhoea). In his verse this becomes a wholly moving awareness of what Donald Davie has described as a quality

362

Journal of Charles Wesley, ed. Jackson, i. 131.

363

Ibid., i. 114.

364

Ibid., i. 135.

365


366

Journal, i. 135; ii. 43.

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of ‘carnality’ in Charles Wesley's verse.367 Davie quotes from one of the Hymns for the Nativity of our Lord (1745): Our God ever blest With Oxen doth rest, Is nurst by his Creature and hangs at the Breast. In ‘nurst by his Creature’ Wesley brings out the old paradox (son of thine own daughter) which emphasizes the mystery of the birth of Christ to the Blessed Virgin Mary; but the portrayal of the feeding infant is touchingly intimate. At the other extreme, his description of the Crucifixion is unsparing: Extended on a cursed tree, Besmeared with dust, and sweat, and blood, See there, the King of glory see! The ‘See there!’ is found in the next hymn of the 1780 Collection: See there! his temples crowned with thorn! His bleeding hands extended wide! His streaming feet, transfixed, and torn! The fountain gushing from his side! Parallel to these Flemish or Gothic pictures of the life of Christ are the images for the spiritual condition. Conversion is a release from prison and bondage (‘My chains fell off ’), and of rising up and going forth. ‘Rising up’ is always associated with energy and activity, so Charles Wesley exhorts himself to ‘Arise, my soul, arise’ (1780: 187, 194). The sin from which he is released is like a disease: A touch, a word, a look from thee, Can turn my heart, and make it clean Purge the foul inbred leprosy, And save me from my bosom sin. Leprosy is only one of the many uses of disease as a metaphor for the unregenerate soul, ‘the sin-sick soul’. It is this soul which is ‘embraced’ with the outstretched arms of mercy (1780: 250), but which needs a strong intervention to make it right with God, signified by four strong verbs: Turn my nature's rapid tide, Stem the torrent of my pride; Stop the whirlwind of my will, Speak, and bid the sun stand still. At the other extreme, Wesley's rapture and excitement is often expressed in images of dancing, leaping, and a general physical exultation, like the figures in Blake's engravings such as ‘Glad Day’:

367

Donald Davie, ‘The Carnality of Charles Wesley’, PN Review, 18/1: 10–15.


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The redeemed of the Lord, We remember his word, And with singing to paradise go. In these hymns of rejoicing the energy is felt in the use of verbs such as ‘press’: Come, let us anew Our journey pursue With vigour arise, And press to our permanent place in the skies. The image of the blind seeing and the lame leaping, from Isaiah 35, is often used to convey this excitement: Blind we were; but now we see; Deaf—we hearken now to thee; Dumb—for thee our tongues employ; Lame—and lo! we leap for joy! Faint we were, and parched with drought— Water at thy word gushed out; Streams of grace our thirst refresh, Starting from the wilderness. Still we gasp thy grace to know! At other times, Jesus is ‘lover of my soul’, and at death the poet longs to be taken like Moses: And kiss my raptured soul away. The enthusiasm of these hymns leads Charles Wesley to strong conclusions, and a formidable doctrine of discipleship: I would the precious time redeem, And longer live for this alone, To spend and to be spent for them Who have not yet my Saviour known Fully on these my mission prove, And only breathe, to breathe thy love. The parable of the talents is a hard lesson, but Charles Wesley does not flinch from it (unlike the Methodist Church, which no longer uses the last four lines): Arm me with jealous care, As in thy sight to live; And Oh! thy servant, Lord, prepare A strict account to give. Help me to watch and pray, And on thyself rely,

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Assured, if I my trust betray, I shall for ever die. It is in this context that Charles Wesley's fighting hymns form a natural part of his doctrine and exhortation. As his social concerns lead towards them, so his poetic carnality pushes him in that direction also: Ready for all alarms, Steadfastly set your face, And always exercise your arms, And use your every grace. ‘And always exercise your arms’ is a good example of the way in which Wesley does not just mention warfare, but accompanies the description of it with realistic detail; and it is the crowding of his hymns with such physical detail that gives them such an impression of strength. It is found at its finest, perhaps, in ‘Wrestling Jacob’, where the energy of the poem comes from the vivid representation of the struggle that takes place, the wrestling with the other. Through the dark night of the soul, the struggler survives, wounded but triumphant, to find in the light of the new dawn that ‘Thy nature, and thy name, is LOVE’. It is Charles Wesley's finest poetic achievement, if only because, like all his hymns, it carries a complex typology of Old and New Testament references, and combines a deep spiritual insight with a physical awareness of the most powerful kind. It moves, like many of his hymns, from an awareness of sin to a contemplation of divine love; and in the process, it has, like Jacob's prayer, ‘power with God’.

11 After the Wesleys Here I raise my Ebenezer, Hither by thy help I'm come; (Robert Robinson, ‘Come, thou fount of every blessing’)

Egotists and Eccentrics: Some Evangelical Contemporaries of the Wesleys John Wesley's Charlestown Collection of Psalms and Hymns was the first of a number of hymn anthologies which appeared during the mid-eighteenth century. The successful encouragement of hymn-singing by the Methodists, including George Whitefield's A Collection of Hymns for Social Worship (1753), and the desire to emulate them, led to the adoption of hymn-singing by the evangelical-minded congregations of the Church of England. At this time, the division between the Methodists and the other elements of the Church was much less marked than it later became: John and Charles Wesley were Anglican priests until their deaths, and William Cowper, who never left the Church, was thought of as a Methodist when he lived in Huntingdon because of the disciplined timetable of his days.368 Cowper's life suggests that there was a network of evangelical priests in the Church of England: he was counselled by Martin Madan, chaplain to the Lock Hospital, during an early spiritual crisis; went to live in Huntingdon with the Revd Morley Unwin; and when Unwin died in an accident in 1767, Cowper and his widow looked about them for a town to live in with a suitable evangelical minister, ending up at Olney with John Newton. The growth of evangelical religion, with its emphasis on grace and personal salvation, followed the decline of rationalism as a basis for religion. It also determined patterns of behaviour, and evangelical clergymen encouraged hymn-singing as part of a new kind of worship: instead of Sternhold and Hopkins, or the ‘New Version’ of Tate and Brady, congregations were to sing hymns that allowed them to express their enthusiasm, their devotion, and the application of the Bible to their human condition. The

368

The Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper, ed. James King and Charles Ryskamp (Oxford, 1979), i. 134.

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result was a number of collections of hymns: publications such as Martin Madan's A Collection of Psalms and Hymns, Extracted from Various Authors of 1760. Madan's was a robust, no-nonsense collection: he thought that hymns should not have ‘phrases, either abstruse in themselves, or beyond the Capacities of the Generality’.369 He aimed for plainness and simplicity, and regretted that he had not entirely succeeded: ‘there are Expressions here and there as abstruse as if they were written in Arabic’.370 To assist the reader in decoding the text, therefore, Madan provided biblical references as footnotes to every page. His preface was an uncompromising document, denouncing any deviation from what he saw as orthodox belief: ‘Fundamentals we must insist upon, which if any Man doth not maintain and believe, we cannot allow him to be a Christian.’ His aggressive prose is filled with the spirit of contemporary controversy; he was an influential and combative figure, until he made himself ridiculous by publishing Thelyphthora, or a Treatise on Female Ruin (1780), which advocated polygamy as a solution to the problem of prostitution. Augustus Montagu Toplady, on the other hand, was mild in the preface to his anthology, Psalms and Hymns for Public and Private Worship (1776), although he also could be a ferocious controversialist. In the days before copyright, Toplady asserted that he had consulted forty or fifty volumes in the compilation of the book, and included a few of his own hymns, most notably ‘Rock of Ages, cleft for me’. He recommended God to the reader as ‘the God of Truth, of Holiness, and of Elegance’, although his own hymns tended to be intense rather than elegant. Meanwhile the Dissenters were also producing new collections of hymns. In 1769 Ash and Evans printed a Baptist book, A Collection of Hymns adapted to Public Worship, and George Burder, a Congregationalist minister (and subsequently editor of the works of Isaac Watts) published A Collection of Hymns from various Authors, intended as a Supplement to Dr Watts (1784). It included what Burder described as the ‘respectable names’ of Doddridge, Newton, Hart, Wesley, Cowper, Toplady, and Cennick. In 1787 there appeared the most successful of all these compilations, John Rippon's A Selection of Hymns from the Best Authors, intended as an Appendix to Dr Watts's ‘Psalms and Hymns’, which went through numerous editions until it reached its final form as ‘The Comprehensive Edition’ of 1844. These collections were often curiously haphazard in their arrangement: there seems to be no discernible structure in any of them, and no reference

369

Martin Madan, ‘Preface’, A Collection of Psalms and Hymns, Extracted from Various Authors (London, 1760), p. i.

370

Ibid., p. ii. Whitefield's Preface also emphasized genuineness of feeling: ‘Hymns composed for such a Purpose [Social Worship] ought to abound much in Thanksgiving, and to be of such a Nature, that all who attend may join in them without being obliged to sing Lies, or not sing, at all . . . ’ (A Collection of Hymns for Social Worship (London, 1753) ).

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to the great festivals of the Christian year. The hymns have a kind of accidental, serendipitous occurrence, and this is made the more obvious by the anticipation of the theory later known as the death of the author. ‘The names of Authors are purposely omitted’, wrote the Revd R. W. Almond in 1819 in the preface to Hymns, for Occasional Use in the Parish Church of St Peter, in Nottingham, ‘as having a tendency to call off the attention from the subject to the Writer of the Hymn’.371 This was one of the many collections for local church use that began to appear at this time: one of the earliest, and the best (with some sense of arrangement also) was Olney Hymns. During the second half of the eighteenth century, the movement of hymnody, through the Wesleys and through others, was away from the general towards the individual and the particular situation, away from reason towards an authenticating personal experience. Watts's universals and Addison's generalities gave way to Toplady's and Cowper's rehearsal of particular anguish and hope. An example of what was lost is John Byrom's ‘Christians, awake’, written in mid-century, in 1749. Byrom's first line suggests a healthy ‘awake’ to the congregations of Christians (following Thomas Ken and Isaac Watts); and the hymn sticks very closely to its preceding texts (Luke 2 and Milton's ‘On the Morning of Christ's Nativity’). Byrom signals his debt to Milton in the first line with the phrase ‘happy morn’, which repeats ‘This is the Month, and this the happy morn’ of Milton's prologue. Byrom reshapes Milton into an eighteenthcentury mode by his use of the heroic couplet, which forms the enthusiasm into precise units: only once does the sense run over from one couplet to the next (in verse 2), and the most frequent punctuation is the colon or semicolon, finishing off a couplet. The result is the sense of an orderly progression: first, the angels singing, and then— to the watchful shepherds it was told Who heard th'angelic herald's voice, Behold— followed by the heavenly choir (‘and suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host’)— He spake, and straightway the celestial choir In hymns of joy, unknown before, conspire. The ‘straightway’ is a reminder of St Mark's gospel, and tightly pressed couplets such as this have the same kind of functional economy that is found in that gospel: To Beth'lem straight th'enlightened shepherds ran, To see the wonder God had wrought for man:

371

R. W. Almond, Hymns, for Occasional Use in the Parish Church of St Peter, in Nottingham (Nottingham, 1819), p. xi.

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The first line is one of those in which an energy comes from the multiple meanings and the successive processes—the shepherds were first enlightened, and then ran. They ran ‘straight’—that is direct, but also immediately. They had received light (‘the glory of the Lord shone round about them’), and they had received mental light, been freed from prejudice and superstition. The movement is that which is found in the ‘Nativity Ode’, where the dark gods disappear with the new dawn. Milton describes a future of truth and justice, but remembers that The babe lies yet in smiling Infancy, That on the bitter cross Must redeem our loss; So both himself and us to glorifie:— which becomes in Byrom Trace we the Babe, who hath retrieved our loss, From his poor manger to his bitter cross. Byrom's poetic practice reorganizes Milton and the Bible into newly shaped thoughts: Amazed, the wondrous story they proclaim, The first apostles of his infant fame. Here he is compressing the original (‘And when they had seen it, they made known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child’) into a kind of wit (the shepherds as the first apostles), with the heroic couplet shaping the original into neat and balanced forms (‘proclaim . . . his fame’). Byrom's hymn was one of the many hymns on the Nativity which began to be written at this time, as the Puritan distrust of Christmas gave way to an understanding of the theological significance of the Incarnation, with an emphasis on divine grace. It was also sung to a new tune, provided by Byrom's friend John Wainwright. It was still a ‘syllabic’ tune, with one note to each syllable, though a florid one; but the early Methodists sang to freer-running melodies, as the old psalm settings gave way to newer tunes. Wainwright was one of the many suppliers of such music, publishing his Collection of Psalm Tunes, Anthems, Hymns and Chants in 1766. John Wesley had produced his own tune book for the early Methodists, entitled Sacred Melody, in 1761, and his instructions in it give some indication of current practice. They include such admonitions as ‘Sing All. See that you join with the congregation as frequently as you can . . . Sing lustily and with a good courage. Beware of singing as if you were half dead, or half asleep . . . Sing modestly. Do not bawl . . . Sing in Time. Whatever time is sung, be sure to keep with it.’372

372

J. T. Lightwood, ‘Preface’, The Music of the Methodist Hymn-Book, ed. and rev. Francis B. Westbrook (London, 1955), p. xix.

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Wesley's instructions suggest that he had come across congregations who sang as if they were half asleep, and individual members who bawled, or sang in the wrong time. In other places, there were no hymns at all, and conscientious clergymen of the Church of England were wondering if there ought to be. In his Free and Candid Disquisitions, Relating to the Church of England, published in 1749, John Jones, then vicar of Alconbury and later of Shephall, lamented that there were parishes where ‘neither psalm nor hymn can be had even on Sundays, much less on holy-days and other days of prayer. So thin are the congregations, and so unskilled in singing!’373 Jones was concerned at the length of the services, at repetition within them, and at the paucity of new material. He admired the psalms and hymns of Isaac Watts, and ‘the Christian instruction, and goodly solace and comfort’ which congregations and families derived from them,374 and advocated ‘a greater variety of hymns and anthems’.375 Jones's wish for new hymns, and the collections of hymns by Madan, Toplady and others, gave plenty of encouragement to the writing of new hymns by contemporaries of the Wesleys. In addition to Byrom, there were John Cennick, Joseph Hart, Thomas Olivers, and Robert Robinson, besides the Welsh hymn-writers and the Calvinist Augustus Montagu Toplady, the most controversial and extraordinary of them all. Each of these writers contributed at least one distinctive hymn that is still in common use: Wesley's contemporaries also included the strange figure of Christopher Smart, whose brilliant and idiosyncratic hymns have been used in a few books but never found wide acceptance. Thomas Olivers, the first of these figures, is chiefly known for ‘The God of Abraham praise’, a free adaptation (with Christian additions) of the Hebrew Yigdal or credal doxology, set to a synagogue melody supplied by the Cantor Meyer Lyon (or Leoni). In this hymn, as James Montgomery noted,376 the majestic style and elevated thought overcome the problems of the awkward (and unique) stanza-form of 6.6.8.4.D. in a succession of vivid images of heaven (in parts 2 and 3): There dwells the Lord our King, The Lord our Righteousness (Triumphant o'er the world and sin) The Prince of Peace; On Sion's sacred height, His Kingdom still maintains; And glorious with his saints in light For ever reigns.

373

John Jones, Free and Candid Disquisitions, Relating to the Church of England (London, 1749), 40.

374

Ibid. 70.

375

Ibid. 73.

376

James Montgomery, Preface to The Christian Psalmist (Glasgow, 1825), p. xxviii.

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Olivers begins his hymn on earth, praising the God of Abraham; but, like Charles Wesley, he then conducts the singer to heaven— The wat'ry deep I pass, With Jesus in my view; And thro' the howling wilderness My way pursue. The uniting of Jesus with the Old Testament image of the howling wilderness (Deuteronomy 32: 10) is characteristic of the Exodus typology that is so common in the hymnody of the period; and in his use of a Jewish source, Olivers offers a very different spirit from the evangelical narrowness of Madan.377 The hymns of this period often used Revelation as well as Exodus, two very dramatic sources for imagery and meaningful episode: Now his merits by the harpers, Thro' the eternal deeps resounds! Now resplendent shine his nail-prints, Every eye shall see His wounds! They who pierced Him, Shall at his appearing wail. The abundant energy of this verse (by John Cennick) actually makes the concentration on blood and wounds more difficult for the singer: the images of cruel suffering which becomes shining and resplendent are grotesque, something which Charles Wesley avoids in his (later) version of the same theme and in the same metre, by referring in general terms to the ‘dear tokens’ of Christ's passion, and the ‘glorious scars’ which produce a ‘rapture’ in the beholders, as well as a wailing in his former persecutors. Cennick's imagery is clumsy and inappropriate: All who love Him view His glory, Shining in His bruised Face: His dear person on the rainbow, Now His people's heads shall raise: Happy mourners! Now on clouds he comes! He comes! The spectacular baroque effect is that of an eighteenth-century ceiling by Verrio; all the more surprising, therefore, that Cennick should have been the author of a neat and elegant pair of hymns for morning and evening, in which the metre (8.3.3.6.) turns each verse into a tight and simple statement: the inner and outer rhymes compress the thought, and make the hymns precise, words answering words to give a plain symmetry:

377

Olivers was a shoemaker, who was converted by hearing Whitefield preach, and who subsequently became one of John Wesley's preachers. He may have written the tune HELMSLEY , now used for ‘Lo, he comes with clouds descending’.

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Rise, my soul, adore thy Maker: Angels praise, Join thy lays, With them be partaker. Father, Lord of every spirit, In Thy light Lead me right Through my Saviour's merit. Here ‘In Thy light/Lead me right’ is a very effective compression, given expansion by the lines before and after. Similarly, in the (better known) evening hymn, Cennick uses the verse-form to produce a similar plainness, which corresponds to the simplicity of thought: Ere I sleep, for every favour This day showed By my God, I will bless my Saviour. The sense carries on through the four lines, with delicate pauses at the line-endings: and the sudden inner rhymes draw attention to themselves and help to emphasize the prominent two-syllabled outer ones: Thou, my rock, my guard, my tower, Safely keep, While I sleep, Me, with all thy power. The suspension ‘keep . . . Me’ is part of the springy effect which contributes to the restrained vigour of these hymns. The same metre was later used by Joseph Hart for a hymn on the inheritance of the saints. Hart, whose hymnody is always intense and vigorous, packs the verse with metaphors; and the effect, at its best, is not unlike that of Herbert. The inheritance of the saints in light is known to the believer through faith (2 Corinthians 7: 1; 1 Peter 1: 4): True, 'twas thine from everlasting, But the bliss of it is Known to thee by tasting. Though thou here receive but little; Scarce enough for the proof Of thy proper title; Urge thy claim through all unfitness; Sue it out, spurning doubt; The Holy Ghost's thy witness. Cite the will of his own sealing; Title good, signed with blood, Valid and unfailing.

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The legal imagery is applied with great dexterity, and beautifully intertwined with scriptural phrases, as in the last verse: When thy title thou discernest, Humbly then sue again For continual earnest. Hart's perpetual enthusiasm is signalled by the demands which he makes upon his readers, or singers. In ‘No prophet, or dreamer of dreams', a warning against false prophets (from Deuteronomy 13: 1), he delays the resolution of the sentence to the end of the second verse; requiring an attention span of sixteen lines. This hymn has survived because of its final verse, which is often divided into two (although here again, the second half depends on the first): This God is the God we adore; Our faithful, unchangeable Friend; Whose love is as great as his power, And neither knows measure nor end. ’Tis Jesus, the First and the Last Whose Spirit shall guide us safe home: We'll praise him for all that is past, And trust him for all that's to come. The praise and trust, linked to past and future, is an indication of the importance which Hart and others attached to experience. Hart's hymns, published in 1759, were actually entitled Hymns composed on Various Subjects, with the Author's Experience, and contained a long account of his religious experience as a preface. They are Calvinist in tone and temper, sometimes explicitly: What makes mistaken men afraid Of sovereign grace to preach! The reason is, if truth be said, Because they are so rich. This is too argumentative to be a good hymn; and Hart's headstrong enthusiasm leads him into excesses which destroy the effect that he is trying to convey. A hymn on the Nativity of Christ is an example: Ye Drunkards, ye Swearers, Ye Muckworms of Earth, Repent, and be Sharers In this blessed Birth. From Sin to release us, That Yoke so long worn, The holy Child Jesus Of Mary was born.

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Oppressors, Transgressors, Of ev'ry Degree, And formal Professors, The worst of the Three, With Tears of Contrition Your Foolishness mourn; To give you Remission Immanuel's born. Even the sweet relief of the last line cannot make up for the violence of the earlier ones. Hart manages to combine a recognition of the importance of the birth of Christ with side-swipes at various kinds of offender: his hymn has none of the sweetness of Byrom's decorous couplets, although on other occasions he can show tenderness: Let us with humble hearts repair (Faith will point out the road) To little Bethlehem, and there Adore our infant God— ‘Little’ is a wonderfully clever adjective, suggesting the ‘little town’ of Bethlehem later to be made famous in an American nineteenth-century hymn. Hart goes on to echo Robert Southwell (‘No Prince, No Pomp’): No pomp adorns, no sweets perfume The place where Christ is laid; A stable serves him for a room, A manger is his bed. The great number of Nativity hymns which appeared during the middle years of the eighteenth century is a measure of its importance in the theology of the Evangelical Revival. Christmas was no longer a festival to be avoided, as it had been for the Puritans, but it became the moment at which the Saviour arrived on earth, committing himself to a process of Redemption which ended with the shedding of his saving blood on the Cross. The interposition of Christ's blood between the sinner and damnation is a principal feature of such hymns as Robert Robinson's ‘Come, thou fount of every blessing’, with its fine use of an unexpected Old Testament reference (1 Samuel 7: 12): Here I raise my Ebenezer, Hither by Thy help I'm come and its continual reiteration of ‘grace’ in the final verse: O to grace how great a debtor Daily I'm constrained to be! Let that grace, Lord, like a fetter, Bind my wandering heart to Thee!

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In these hymns the sinner looks towards the Cross as the only hope: this is the doctrine of Toplady's ‘Rock of ages, cleft for me’. The ‘me’ is important: indeed Lionel Adey has referred to Toplady's hymn as ‘that most egocentric of lyrics’.378 In the first line, ‘me’ is one of the four heavy syllables which emerge from the trochaic metre, throwing the stresses on to ‘Rock’, ‘age’(s), ‘cleft’, and ‘me’. The first two suggest hardness and permanence: but suddenly, with ‘cleft’, the rock is opened to provide a refuge. The line itself enacts the thought, moving from the hardness of ‘Rock’ to the softness of ‘me’ through the astonishing ‘cleft’, representing (as the original text does) the majesty of God and the frailty of humanity: ‘And it shall come to pass, while my glory passeth by, that I will put thee in a cleft of the rock, and will cover thee with my hand while I pass by’ (Exodus 33: 22). Toplady's hermeneutics force this into a New Testament mode: his handling of the text is designed to bring out the paradox that the rock is Christ himself (1 Corinthians 10: 4), drawing on Deuteronomy 32: 4, and the ‘Rock of salvation’ (Deuteronomy 32: 15). The word ‘salvation’ opens into the New Testament and the emblems of the passion: Let the Water and the Blood, From thy riven Side which flow'd, Be of sin the double cure; Cleanse me from it's guilt and pow'r. The water and the blood are a ‘double cure’ for a two-sided sin, involving guilt and power. Toplady intensifies the opposition, and makes the process an extreme one (‘no respite . . . for ever . . . Thou alone’): Could my zeal no respite know, Could my tears for ever flow, All for sin could not atone: Thou must save, and Thou alone. This intensity prepares the way for the extraordinary physicality of the next verse, in which the processes of salvation are pictured in dramatic and flamboyant gestures: it is an evangelical emblematizing, showing the sinner as emptyhanded, clinging to the cross, naked, helpless, and dirty— Nothing in my hand I bring; Simply to thy Cross I cling; Naked, come to Thee for dress; Helpless, look to Thee for grace; Foul, I to the Fountain fly: Wash me, SAVIOR, or I die! ‘I die’ is to be understood in a spiritual sense, but it leads on naturally to the idea of physical death in the last verse:

378

Lionel Adey, Hymns and the Christian Myth’ (Vancouver, 1986), 6.

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While I draw this fleeting breath— When my eye-strings break in death— When I soar to worlds unknown— See Thee on thy judgment-throne— Rock of ages, cleft for me, Let me hide myself in Thee! The breaking of the eye-strings carries on the powerful physicality of this poem (the eye-strings, or eye muscles, were traditionally supposed to break at death): and the prayer at the end revisits the opening couplet with the accumulated experience of the intervening verses resonating into it—describing salvation, sin, the uselessness of salvation by works (as condemned by Madan) and the need for total dependence on the act of Redemption by the Saviour on the Cross. The interpretation of spiritual truths through the body is one reason for the strength of this hymn: its most striking image is that of hiding, which conveys the sense of fear and yet also of safety. It is a traditional image, which is found, for example, in St Bonaventure (‘I will goe and hide my selfe in the cavernes of his wounds, and there remaine quietly’379); the mystical and contemplative element which this suggests was acutely picked up by Montgomery, who saw that Toplady's hymn transcended the customary evangelical statement. He noted ‘a peculiarly ethereal spirit’ in Toplady's hymns, in which, whether mourning or rejoicing, praying or praising, the writer seems absorbed in the full triumph of faith, and ‘whether in the body or out of the body, caught up into the third heaven’, and beholding unutterable things.380 Montgomery has successfully identified the individual character of Toplady's hymn; but, like all these evangelical hymns, it was rooted in the Bible, and especially in the typological connection between the Old Testament and the New. The Exodus narrative of the freeing of the children of Israel from captivity as an emblem of Christ's freeing of his people from death, brilliantly expounded by Charles Wesley, is found again in the greatest of all Exodic hymns, William Williams's ‘Guide me, O thou great Jehovah’. Williams has a supreme poetic tact, which allows him to understate the typology, and yet signify it to the attentive reader, so that the singer/reader has to supply the imaginative connections. The ‘Bread of heaven’ of verse 1 is the manna in the wilderness, but also the ‘living bread’ of John 6; the ‘crystal fountain’ is the rock which was smitten by Moses, but also the ‘healing stream’ of water and blood from the side of Christ, the ‘strong deliverer’. The same understatement is found in the description of the soul treading the verge of Jordan, about to die and cross to the Promised Land: instead of Toplady's naked, struggling, helpless figure, Williams contents himself with ‘anxious fears'—

379

Quoted in Louis L. Martz, The Poetry of Meditation (rev. edn., 1962), 159.

380

Montgomery, Preface to The Christian Psalmist, p. xxvi.

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Death of death, and hell's destruction which treat the problem of death seriously and theologically, but not dramatically. The hymn is justly famous because it places the assurance of redemption so firmly in the context of an earthly life: and Williams has the good sense and poetic intuition to allow the reader/singer to make the connections, rather than stating them overtly. It is one of the greatest of evangelical hymns mainly because of its understatement: Toplady's melodrama has been replaced by a significant typology.

Christopher Smart Smart was once described, by Donald Davie, as the greatest English poet between Pope and Wordsworth. This provocative claim is presumably based on the whole of Smart's literary output, including the astonishing Jubilate Agno, written when Smart was incarcerated in a mental hospital (primarily because he insisted on praying in public). Jubilate Agno, with its wonderful mixture of the immediate and the mystical, lies outside the scope of this book, although it should be noted as an extreme production of the same mind that created the psalms and hymns. The result, in hymnodic terms, is an art which is fresh and unusual, but which (perhaps for those very reasons) has never found wide acceptance.381 Smart's A Song to David, first published in 1763, was an exception to this neglect, because editions appeared in 1819 and 1827, and it attracted the attention of Robert Browning, who published a poem about Smart in Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day (1887). Browning saw Smart as the one poet between Milton and Keats who pierced the screen ’Twixt thing and word, lit language straight from soul and this quality of inspirational immediacy is instantly recognizable in the last two verses of A Song to David: Glorious the northern lights astream; Glorious the song, when God's the theme; Glorious the thunder's roar:

381

Percy Dearmer tried to encourage the singing of Smart's work by including four hymns in Songs of Praise, but in common with other extracts from great poets in that extraordinary book (Spenser, Shakespeare, Blake, Shelley, Hardy) they have never been widely adopted as hymns for worship. Two ‘university’ hymn-books, The Clarendon Hymn Book (Oxford, 1936) and The Cambridge Hymnal (Cambridge, 1967), printed Smart: but the only one of Smart's hymns in major denominational hymn-books is ‘Where is this stupendous stranger?’, which has been included in some recent ones (The New English Hymnal (Norwich, 1986); Rejoice and Sing (Oxford, 1991)). The book from which it is taken, Hymns and Spiritual Songs (London, 1765), was not reprinted between its first appearance and 1949.

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Glorious Hosannah from the den; Glorious the catholic Amen; Glorious the martyr's gore: Glorious, more glorious, is the crown Of him that brought salvation down, By meekness called thy Son: Thou that stupendous truth believed; And now the matchless deed's achieved, Determined, dared, and done.382 The text is oddly allusive: the ‘den’ may be the den of thieves, from Matthew 21: 13, or perhaps the prison from which Paul and Silas sang praises.383 And the poem as a whole has strange constituents, such as the seven pillars of the Lord, each named from a letter of the Greek alphabet, whose significance is obscure (‘Iota's tun'd to choral hymns’). Its chief virtue is Smart's ability to use rhetoric in the service of the sublime, which is evident in the anaphora of ‘Glorious’ and the climactic alliteration of the final line. David was, for Smart, the ‘scholar of the Lord’ (line 223), who is commanded to ‘insist’ on God's ways and ‘The genuine word repeat’ (line 291). The instruction is to ‘Praise above all’, for all things exist to the glory of God and for the adoration of Him, sweet things, strong things, beautiful things, precious things, and (finally) glorious things. Songs of Praise prints a verse from the catalogue of strong things: Strong is the lion, like a coal His eyeball, like a bastion's mole His chest against the foes: Strong the gier-eagle on his sail; Strong against tide the enormous whale Emerges as he goes; The liveliness of Smart's imagination is linked with its oddity, its enthusiasm for all kinds of abundant and even unusual nature (a ‘gier-eagle’ is a vulture): it involves a certain naïvety, a delightful series of encounters with the natural world which make the poem, in spite of its metre, unsuitable for most worship. Similarly, Smart's Hymns and Spiritual Songs, published with A Translation of the Psalms of David in 1765, are (in the words of the modern editors) ‘imaginative poetry, hymns only in name, making too few of the inevitable practical compromises to be acceptable in popular congregational use’.384

382

The text is from The Clarendon Hymn Book, which amends ‘at’ to ‘that’ (last verse, line 4).

383

The Poetical Works of Christopher Smart, ii. Religious Poetry 1763–1771, ed. Marcus Walsh and Karina Williamson (Oxford, 1983), 447.

384

Ibid. 23.

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They were composed ‘for the Fasts and Festivals of the Church of England,’ and therefore stand at a considerable remove from the ‘experimental’ hymnody of the Wesleys and Joseph Hart, with its emphasis on individual experience. Smart's hymns are remarkable for the enthusiasm which is found every-where in his work, as well as in his eccentric life. He referred to his Jubilate Agno as ‘My MAGNIFICAT’,385 and his hymns display a kind of naïvety which is delightful but which makes them vulnerable to cynicism, and hence unsuitable for public singing in most places. The enthusiasm is found in the language itself, in Smart's use of obsolescent words and unexpected rhymes: Lo! the poor, alive and likely Midst desertion and distress, Teach the folk that deal obliquely, They had better bear and bless. If we celebrate Matthias, Let us do it heart and soul; Nor let worldly reasons bias Our conceptions from their goal. This is from the hymn for St Matthias's day, 24 February: it contrasts Matthias, the poor but honest man, with Judas (whom he replaced as an apostle). The poor are ‘alive and likely’, that is ‘fit to be liked’, who are contrasted with those who ‘deal obliquely’ (dishonestly). Smart was using words that were old-fashioned in his own day; and he went on to rhyme Matthias with ‘bias’ in a way that can easily be seen to be comic. At other times his juxtapositions are startling, as in the hymn for the feast day of St Philip and St James (1 May): Great to-day thy song and rapture In the choir of Christ and WREN When two prizes were the capture Of the hand that fish'd for men. The choir of Christ and Wren is St Paul's Cathedral; Smart's delight is to celebrate the Saviour and the architect in a flamboyant zeugma. Donald Davie has described one quality of Smart's verse as ‘English rococo’,386 and the surprise is a part of this. Davie also, rightly, stresses Smart's dancing metres, and especially his fondness (as in the hymn to St Matthias) of the feminine rhyme in lines 1 and 3 of a trochaic quatrain. It occurs in the hymn for St Philip and St James's day:

385

Jubilate Agno B1.43. See Harriet Guest, A Form of Sound Words: The Religious Poetry of Christopher Smart (Oxford, 1989), 137 ff.

386

Donald Davie, The Eighteenth-Century Hymn in England (Cambridge, 1993), 95 ff.

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Now the winds are all composure, But the breath upon the bloom, Blowing sweet o'er each inclosure, Grateful off'rings of perfume. In the hymn for 1 May, Smart takes the opportunity to write about spring, in verses which appeared in Songs of Praise (with an explanatory note about cardamine): Cowslips seize upon the fallow, And the cardamine in white, Where the corn-flow'rs join the mallow, Joy and health, and thrift unite— Smart's unaffected delight in the natural world, in cheerfulness and praise, is matched by his strong dislike of selfishness, especially in money matters. ‘Misers have no hope’, he declares roundly in the hymn for St Barnabas' day, and the hymn for St Mark expresses the theme of charity in dramatic speech: Then let us not this day refuse, With joy to give the Christian dues To Lazars at the door; ‘O for the name and love of Christ ‘Spare one poor dole from all your grist, ‘One mite from all your store!’ The form of this hymn is a reminder of Smart's metrical variety, commented on by Davie:387 it is found in the hymns for Whit-Sunday and for Trinity Sunday, the first vigorously patriotic, the second curiously numerological: O THREE! of blest account To which all sums amount, For if the church has two The work of prayer to do, God himself, th'Almighty word, Will be there to make the third. The first reference may be to Pythagorean symbols;388 the second to Matthew 18: 19–20. Smart then thinks of other threes: One Lord, one faith, one font, Are all good Christians want To make the fiend retreat, And build the saint compleat; Where the Godhead self-allied, Faith, hope, charity reside.

387

Ibid. 107 ff.

388

Poetical Works, ii, ed. Walsh and Williamson, 398. Herbert was similarly attracted by the numbers game in describing the Holy Trinity. His poem ‘Trinity Sunday’ in the Williams MS begins: ‘He that is one, | Is none. | Two reacheth thee | In some degree . . . ’

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Such complexities and ingenuities are found everywhere is Smart's work, which is one reason why his hymns have never become widely popular. Verses from his lovely hymn entitled ‘The Nativity of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ’ (from which ‘Where is this stupendous stranger?’ is extracted) show precisely that endearing enthusiasm which makes his work so unsuitable for congregational praise: Nature's decorations glisten Far above their usual trim; Birds on box and laurel listen As so near the cherubs hymn. Boreas no longer winters On the desolated coast; Oaks no more are riv'n in splinters By the whirlwind and his host. Spinks and ousels sing sublimely, ‘We too have a Saviour born’; Whiter blossoms burst untimely On the blest Mosaic thorn. The idea that Christ's birth turns winter into spring is not new, but Smart's hymn conveys (perhaps through its metre) a sense of lively pleasure at the created world singing for joy. Characteristically, Smart is thinking of the Glastonbury thorn, which was traditionally supposed to bloom at Christmas and to have come from the staff of Joseph of Arimathaea. It is conflated here with the staff of Aaron which blossomed in the tabernacle (Numbers 17: 8). After this complicated myth, the final verse (used in modern hymn-books) is as glorious in its paradox as Charles Wesley's ‘Being's source begins to be’, though not so startling linguistically: God all-bounteous, all-creative Whom no ills from good dissuade, Is incarnate, and a native Of the very world he made. Smart's emphasis on the importance of the Incarnation is characteristic of his age; his introduction of hymns for the Church year is less so, though there had been examples before him in the work of Wither, Herbert, and Ken. Even so they would (in Marcus Walsh's words) ‘have seemed strange both to orthodox Churchmen on the one hand, and to Methodists and Evangelicals on the other’.389 Walsh points out that there are no musical settings for these hymns, and doubts if they were ever intended for congregational singing; this is probably right, but Smart's general naïvety and

389

Poetical Works, ii, ed. Walsh and Williamson, 11.

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infectious enthusiasm may have led him to hope that someone would write tunes for them, or that they would be sung to tunes that were already in circulation. Certainly Smart's Psalms of David were written to be sung to ‘all the old favourite Tunes’, and a tune book was published for them with tunes by celebrated London organists. They were not very successful, partly because they were in competition with many other metrical versions—the Old Version, still much loved and still being printed, Tate and Brady's New Version, Patrick, Watts, Blackmore and others—including a contemporary rival, James Merrick's The Psalms, Translated or Paraphrased in English Verse.390 Smart's aim, however, was understandable: to provide for the Church of England a psalm book that would serve for Anglican worship in the same way that Watts's Psalms of David had done for the Dissenters. Smart followed Watts, too, in ‘Christianizing’ the psalms, and Marcus Walsh has argued that the many references to grace (as in Robert Robinson's hymn) suggest that he had the evangelical element of the Church in mind.391 Smart chose to translate verse for verse from the Book of Common Prayer, which gave him plenty of room to elaborate on the original text. He therefore appropriated the text more than previous translators, and allowed himself space to be mellifluous: The man is blest of God thro' Christ, Who is not by the world intic't, Where broader ruin lies; Nor has descended to a seat, Where scoffers at the gospel meet, Their Saviour to despise. Smart's psalms sit very loosely to their originals, and this freedom allows him, in his own words, to make melodious mention Of the wonders of thy word. (9: 1) He often (as here) uses the attractive trochaic stanza which is found in Hymns and Spiritual Songs, with the double rhyme:

390

James Merrick's The Psalms, Translated or Paraphrased in English Verse appeared in the same year as Smart's psalms, 1765. Merrick claimed to have had the help of the great Robert Lowth, author of the first major study of Hebrew poetry, De Sacra Poesi Hebraeorum (1753). Merrick said that the psalms had ‘not been calculated for the uses of public worship’ (Preface, p. vii), and certainly his versions were for the most part renderings of the psalms in rather flat octosyllabics. Later in the century, however, tunes were written for some of them, notably by Haydn. See Nicholas Temperley, The Music of the English Parish Church (Cambridge, 1979), ii. 130.

391

The Poetical Works of Christopher Smart, iii, A Translation of the Psalms of David, ed. Marcus Walsh (Oxford, 1987), pp. xxxii–xxxiii.

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In thy sacred institutions, Lord, be thou my gracious guide, Strengthen my good resolutions, By thy canons to abide. With a Christian education Give my soaring soul her scope; For thou, God of my salvation Art alone my daily hope. All these qualities make Smart's psalms attractive; but, as Harriet Guest has observed (and as the presence of Smart in only a few hymn-books confirms), his Hymns and Spiritual Psalms had no audience. This argument may be extended to the psalms. ‘The poetry of Smart's Hymns’, writes Guest, ‘attempts to exhort into being the congregation capable of rehearsing its praises.’392 She points out that Smart's work stands opposed to the Church of his age, which was coming to terms with commercial prosperity. In other words, Smart is too independent-minded, too much his own man, with his vision of a redeemed natural world and of universal benevolence, to be easily accommodated into a hymn-book.

Olney Hymns Olney Hymns (1779) contained 348 hymns (some of which had appeared previously in hymn collections) in three books, ‘I: On Select Texts of Scripture’, ‘II: On Occasional Subjects’, and ‘III: On the Progress and Changes of the Spiritual Life’. The categories would have been rather broad for Wesley, but they indicated a certain sense of order and purpose. Sixty-seven of the hymns were by Cowper, the remainder by Newton, who also wrote the preface. Newton had become curate of Olney in 1764; Cowper went to live there in 1767, principally to become a member of Newton's congregation, and the hymn collection was a product of the atmosphere of evangelical piety which pervaded the church community. It was also, in Newton's words, ‘a monument, to perpetuate the remembrance of an intimate and endeared friendship’ (‘Preface’, p. vi). The result was a book which was a heady mixture of intimacy, confession, and Calvinism: Newton recorded that ‘the views I have received of the doctrines of grace are essential to my peace, I could not live comfortably a day or an hour without them’ (p. x). Cowper's subsequent collapse under the pressure of this evangelical religion, and his belief that he was for ever excluded from hope, have led critics to find evidence of fragility and despair in his hymns;393 but although there is honest uncertainty in them, they were

392

Guest, A Form of Sound Words, 286.

393

Cowper's fragility and despair have been emphasized by Erik Routley (see n. 394 below). Some examples (from David Cecil, in The Stricken Deer and Goldwin Smith, in Cowper ) were quoted in ch. 1. For more temperate and less subjective opinions, see Patricia Meyer Spacks, The Poetry of Vision (Cambridge, Mass., 1967); Lowick Hartley, ‘The Worm and the Thorn: A Study of Cowper's Olney Hymns’, Journal of Religion, 39 (1949), 220–9; and two good modern studies of Cowper, Vincent Newey, Cowper's Poetry (Liverpool, 1982), and Bill Hutchings, The Poetry of William Cowper (London, 1982). Opinions of Cowper's hymns, and the hymns themselves, are discussed in detail in J. R. Watson, ‘Cowper's Olney Hymns’, Essays and Studies (London, 1985), 45–65. All quotations from Olney Hymns are taken from the first edn., 1779.

394

Greatheed thought that ‘our departed friend conceived some presentiment of this sad reverse as it drew near’ and composed ‘God moves in a mysterious way’ under the influence of that presentiment; Erik Routley, for example, confidently described ‘God moves in a mysterious way’ as ‘written by a man conquered by despair’ (I'll Praise My Maker (London, 1951), 109).

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written at a time when Cowper was in full accord with Newton's robust preaching, and the result is a book that is remarkably homogeneous, although there is a particular delicacy in Cowper's hymnody that contrasts with the powerful straightforwardness and verbal fortissimo of Newton. Newton's plain speaking is found in his Preface: I am not conscious of having written a single line with an intention, either to flatter, or to offend any party or person upon earth. I have simply declared my own views and feelings, as I might have done if I had composed hymns in some of the newly-discovered islands in the South-Sea, where no person had any knowledge of the name of Jesus, but myself. (p. ix) It is the name of Jesus that Newton hears in one of his best-known hymns: How sweet the name of Jesus sounds In a believer's ear! It sooths his sorrows, heals his wounds, And drives away his fear. Sorrows, wounds, fears: the three problems are disposed of with briskness, as though Newton is anxious to get on: It makes the wounded spirit whole, And calms the troubled breast; 'Tis Manna to the hungry soul, And to the weary rest. ‘Wounded spirit . . . troubled breast . . . hungry soul’: Newton's rhetoric is firm, adjective and noun three times, surrounded by variations—‘makes . . . whole’, ‘calms’, ‘'Tis Manna’, ‘rest’. The experience is ordered, as it is in Doddridge, through the parallelisms of Common Metre, given a neat chiasmus at the end. At the same time it demonstrates Newton's particular mode of adding image to image, to create an impression of multiple activity and abundance: Jesus! my Shepherd, Husband, Friend, My Prophet, Priest, and King; My Lord, my Life, my Way, my End, Accept the praise I bring. (I. lvii) The echo of John 14: 6 (‘I am the way, the truth, and the life’) is present, but Newton inserts a multitude of other references, often becoming paradoxes—Jesus

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is shepherd and husbandman, prophet and king, Lord and life, way and end. These attributes occur in such rapid succession that the mind receives an overwhelming impression of richness: Newton's enthusiasm is perhaps a product of his convert's amazement, so that he saw his extraordinary life (sinner, sailor, captain of a slave ship, clergyman) as a Pauline pattern of extremes. So the grace of God is an ‘amazing grace’, which has a sweet sound (‘How sweet the name of Jesus sounds’) and which . . . sav'd a wretch like me! ‘Saved’ is common as a metaphor, from the Acts of the Apostles and from the Epistles of St Paul: for Newton, who had known the dangers of the sea, it seems to acquire a sense that is strangely physical: Thro' many dangers, toils and snares, I have already come; 'Tis grace has brought me safe thus far, And grace will lead me home. (I. xli) Newton had experienced the dangers, and come in to many harbours: like Joseph Conrad, he writes from experience, and his sea-going gives his perspective a peculiar authenticity: With Christ in the vessel I smile at the storm. (III. xxxvii) The literal and metaphorical are held in an active tension here: Newton's figures are, like Charles Wesley's, powerful because they are those of physical experience—sweet sounds, comfort, release, coming home, giving sight, quenching thirst: See! the streams of living waters Springing from eternal love; Well supply thy sons and daughters, And all fear of want remove: Who can faint while such a river Ever flows their thirst t'assuage? Grace, which like the Lord, the giver, Never fails from age to age. (I. lx) Only in the last two lines in the description of water carried over into its metaphorical sense. Newton defamiliarizes the traditional through having experienced the biblical metaphors—having been thirsty, lost, in storms, in danger: so that when he speaks of Solid joys and lasting treasure the wonderful word ‘solid’ has behind it all the connotations of terra firma for a sailor, of what Conrad portrays Marlow as describing as the fate of the

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solitary in Heart of Darkness: ‘You can't understand. How could you?—with solid pavement under your feet . . . ’.394 It is this sense of ordinary images as marvellous and unfamiliar that marks out Newton's verse. He takes the image of the sinner as worm, for instance, and gives it a substance by describing it (as Blake was later to do in The Book of Thel) with the clay around it: I was a groveling creature once, And basely cleav'd to earth; I wanted spirit to renounce The clod that gave me birth. But God has breath'd upon a worm, And sent me, from above, Wings, such as clothe an angel's form The wings of joy and love. (III. li) Newton here realizes the metaphor of ‘earth-bound’, and ‘Wings’ is beautifully placed; he is extremely skilful at the beginnings and endings of lines, which often surprise with their force, as with the word repose’, which means ‘rest’ or ‘quiet’, but which also suggests resting upon something, in this case a rock: On the rock of ages founded, What can shake thy sure repose?— (I. lx) The verse comes to rest on a crucial word, as it does (for example) throughout ‘Amazing Grace’: I once was lost, but now am found, Was blind, but now I see— 'Tis grace has brought me safe thus far, And grace will lead me home— The hymn ends with the vision of unity with God against a background of a collapsed world: The earth shall soon dissolve like snow, The sun forbear to shine; But God, who call'd me here below, Will be for ever mine. (I. xli) ‘Mine’ is Newton's unabashed concentration on the self: even ‘How sweet the name of Jesus sounds’, which begins in the third person, slips naturally into the first; and ‘Glorious things of thee are spoken’, which addresses Zion, comes round to

394

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (Uniform (Medallion) edn., London, 1925) ch. 2 (p. 116).

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Saviour, if of Zion's city I thro' grace a member am;— Newton, the evangelical preacher, perpetually writes a testimony of ‘I’ and ‘me’. When he decides not to do so, his verse becomes flat moralizing: As parched in the barren sands Beneath a burning sky; The worthless bramble with'ring stands, And only grows to die. Such is the sinner's awful case, Who makes the world his trust; And dares his confidence to place In vanity and dust. (l. lxvi) His verse comes to life when it is about himself, his unregenerate years and the amazing grace which transformed them. At such moments the technique—the delicate placing of words, the powerful images, the significant rhymes—is used to express an intensity which is not just personal or egotistical but representative of a certain kind of religious experience. And because it is located in himself, in a specific place, it is also involved in time, in what Wordsworth called ‘spots of time’. Like a preacher turning an occasion to his advantage, Newton writes a hymn ‘On the eclipse of the moon. July 30, 1776’: The moon in silver glory shone, And not a cloud in sight; When suddenly a shade begun To intercept the light. How fast across her orb it spread, How fast her light withdrew! A circle, ting'd with languid red, Was all appear'd in view. Many people, says Newton, gaze on such things with ‘unmeaning eye’, but he proposes to meditate on thy eclipse In sad Gethsemane. The eclipse was the agony in the garden, which comes about when Jesus was taking the sins of the world upon himself: Thy peoples guilt, a heavy load! (When standing in their room) Depriv'd thee of the light of God, And fill'd thy soul with gloom.

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But because eclipses move punctually, obedient to the will of God, any discomfort which the poet feels on this earth will be bound to disappear, in a place where all changes are over: Then shall I see thee face to face And be eclipsed no more. (II. lxxxv) There are a number of such nature hymns towards the end of Book II of Olney Hymns, each of which takes a natural phenomenon—‘Moon-light’, ‘The sea’, ‘The flood’, ‘The thaw’, ‘The loadstone’, ‘The spider and bee’ (the bees are the good, working for God in his flower-garden, the spiders are the wicked). These hymns versify commonplaces in ways that Coleridge would have recognized as those of fancy (the mechanical, aggregative faculty) rather than those of imagination.395 When Newton preaches in his hymns, the result can also be a rather disagreeable authoritarianism, mixed with threats, although his skill with rhymes makes the verse very dramatic: Stop, poor sinner! stop and think Before you farther go! Will you sport upon the brink Of everlasting woe? Once again I charge you, stop! For, unless you warning take, Ere you are aware, you drop Into the burning lake! (III. ii) However, these ‘Solemn Addresses to Sinners’ always end with relief: It is not too late To Jesus to flee, His mercy is great, His pardon is free; His blood has such virtue For all that believe, That nothing can hurt you, If him you receive. (III. i) In the hymns about the self, Newton gives up this strident tone in favour of an awareness of life that is more sensitive to human problems and vicissitudes. But his hymns are always strong with the sense of triumphant effort: indeed two of them are called ‘The Effort’. Both are intensely personal: the first even has ‘I’ underlined in verse 2: Lord I am come! thy promise is my plea— (III. xi)

395

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (The Collected Works, vii), ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton and London, 1983), i. 304.

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and both end in the same way, with four verbs: I must, I will, I can, I do believe. (III. xi, xii) Through different stages of compulsion, intention, and possibility, Newton talks himself into a declaration of faith. In hymns such as this there is a kind of blunt honesty, a directness which can be almost shocking in its plainness, its unconcealed vigour of utterance. Only rarely, as in ‘Prayer answered by crosses', does he permit himself a moment of reflection on the difficulties of the Christian life: ’Twas he who taught me thus to pray And he, I trust, has answer'd pray'r; But it has been in such a way, It almost drove me to despair. (III. xxxvi) Again the directness is shocking, and it is difficult to imagine this as a congregational hymn; but the important qualifier is ‘almost’, and the hymn answers doubts by allowing the Lord to justify his methods. It is all done, Newton tells himself, in order to break thy schemes of earthly joy, That thou may'st find thy all in me. So ‘crosses’ are part of the working of Divine Providence, and Newton's own experience of the operations of that providence made him powerfully conscious of the need to proclaim it. He is the sailor who has survived the voyage, who smiles at the storm (in ‘Begone unbelief’) and who celebrates the ‘amazing grace’ which has saved him; he knows the sweetness of Jesus' name to those who believe, and looks forward to the glories of Zion. It is no accident, perhaps, that his best-known hymns are related to these stages of the Christian life—salvation by faith, belief in Christ as Saviour, and hope of Heaven. Cowper went to live at Olney for a specific reason. ‘I want to be with the Lord's People’, he wrote, ‘having great Need of quickening Intercourse and the Communion of his Saints.’396 He was a man in need, not a clergyman, and his hymns are less inclined to preach than Newton's, more introspective, more probing into the uncertain moods of the self. It is characteristic of his temperament that he should have read The Pilgrim's Progress and privileged a very human and tentative moment in Bunyan's text, when Christian is fleeing from the City of Destruction and meets Evangelist.397 Cowper versifies this into Short Metre:

396

The Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper, i. 176.

397

‘Then said Evangelist, pointing with his finger over a very wide Field, Do you see yonder Wicket-gate? The Man said, No. Then said the other, Do you see yonder shining light? He said, I think I do.’

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I see, or think I see, A glimm'ring from afar; A beam of day that shines for me To save me from despair. (III. viii) The ‘or think I see’ leaves open the possibility that the light may be an illusion; and it is not surprising that a number of Cowper's hymns appeared in the ‘Seeking’ and ‘Conflict’ sections of Book III of Olney Hymns. In ‘The waiting soul’ he acknowledged the difficulties of faith: I wish, thou know'st, to be resign'd, And wait with patient hope; But hope delay'd fatigues the mind, And drinks the spirit up. In this hymn anxiety is turned into a confirmation of his religious sensibility, at the same time as expressing his sense of a cold heart (as opposed to the ‘warmed heart’ of the evangelicals): Cold as I feel this heart of mine, Yet since I feel it so; It yields some hope of life divine Within, however low. (III. x) Cowper is often unsure of himself and his religious status: The Lord will happiness divine On contrite hearts bestow: Then tell me, gracious God, is mine A contrite heart, or no? This hymn, ‘The contrite heart’ (from Isaiah 57: 15), dramatizes the inner uncertainty with a series of simple statements: I hear, but seem to hear in vain, Insensible as steel; If ought is felt, 'tis only pain To find I cannot feel. The language takes one step forward and two steps back: ‘I hear . . . hear in vain’, ‘is felt . . . cannot feel’. The language is simple but the emotion is complex, almost contradictory: the striking simile ‘Insensible as steel’ is followed by ‘pain’—from a state in which he can feel nothing to another state in which he feels pain (the vowel sounds of ‘pain’ come as a shock after the thin nasals and sibilants of the second line). Similarly, the next verse suggests the torments of a divided mind (and contrasts with Newton's robust and confident ‘I’, a single and self-established ‘I’): I sometimes think myself inclin'd To love thee, if I could;

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But often feel another mind, Averse to all that's good. The result is that the poet believes himself to be isolated in the congregation (anticipating Wordsworth in The Prelude and Hardy in ‘The Impercipient’), unable to go along with the whole-hearted fervour of evangelical worship: Thy saints are comforted I know, And love thy house of pray'r; I therefore go where others go, But find no comfort there. The tradition of the contrite heart goes back to Psalm 34: 18, but it is here given a modern application, one which testifies to Cowper's honesty and Newton's large-mindedness (in printing it in Olney Hymns). In this hymn Cowper was rewriting Watts (with the allusion to ‘thy saints’, and to loving thy house of prayer—from Watts's Divine Songs) and in so doing he was introducing his own questioning and individual note into the discussion of religious experience. The final verse continues the accurate assertion of uncertainty with a series of alternatives and conditional clauses: O make this heart rejoice, or ache; Decide this doubt for me; And if it be not broken, break, And heal it, if it be. The poem is tense in its short lines and its strong verbs (‘ache . . . break’), and the gentleness of ‘And heal it’ is succeeded by the final questioning ‘if ’. It is a rare example of a penitential hymn that does not at some point become pleased with itself for being penitent. Cowper's sense of himself as an uncertain Christian precludes his writing as if he were in a pulpit, as Doddridge and Beddome and Newton do. One of his key words is ‘sometimes' (as Donald Davie has pointed out398)—I sometimes think myself inclin'd’ . . . ‘Sometimes a light surprizes’. This uncertainty is endearing, but it should not be confused with despair, which Cowper is often accused of expressing. It is facile, I think, to construct a late-twentieth-century version of Cowper, based on what we know of his life and on Samuel Greatheed's memorial sermon with its discussion of Cowper's breakdown in 1773.32 Cowper's hymns are sometimes tentative and often uncertain, but they are not about despair. They are rather about hesitations, but also the joy

398

Donald Davie, ‘Preface’, The New Oxford Book of Christian Verse (Oxford, 1981), p. xxv.

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and peace that comes ‘sometimes’ to the believer, about the providence of God, about the unlooked-for blessings, the occasional walk with God, the quiet sound of the divine voice. The distinctive mark of these hymns is the way in which Cowper instinctively (it seems) chooses a mode of expression which sweetly corresponds to the idea. That word ‘sweetly’ comes in gracefully in ‘Joy and peace in believing’: In holy contemplation, We sweetly then pursue The theme of God's salvation, And find it ever new:— The gentle and unassuming continuity of these lines enacts the pleasure of the thought, the joy and peace of the hymn's title. It is what Vincent Newey has beautifully called ‘contemplation as a means of grace’.399 Whatever happens on the morrow, this is one of those ‘sometimes’ moments in which the soul feels warmth and light: When comforts are declining, He grants the soul again A season of clear shining To cheer it after rain. The happiness of the soul is evanescent and changeable, like the English weather that Cowper the country walker knew in all its fickle moods. His hymns celebrate the sunshine and the rain, and tell us that sometimes the rain is unexpectedly refreshing: Ye fearful saints fresh courage take, The clouds ye so much dread Are big with mercy, and shall break In blessings on your head. The clouds of mercy (the image is taken from Portia's speech in The Merchant of Venice, IV. i) only appear threatening to the fearful: this hymn, which Routley described as the work of a despairing man, is in fact a poem of generosity and reassurance. Cowper is exhorting the fearful saints to take courage, and to trust: Judge not the Lord by feeble sense, But trust him for his grace; Behind a frowning providence, He hides a smiling face. Cowper sees God as playing a kind of game here, pretending to be a frowning providence but really having a smiling face; and in the next verse the surprise goes on:

399

Vincent Newey, Cowper's Poetry, 160.

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His purposes will ripen fast Unfolding ev'ry hour; The bud may have a bitter taste, But sweet will be the flow'r. It the first printing of this hymn, in Newton's Twenty-six Letters on Religious Subjects of 1774, the last line (‘But wait, to smell the flow'r’) has a playfulness which is lost in the more decorous printing of Olney Hymns. Cowper suggests gentle games which show that appearances are deceptive, and that without faith human beings are prone to error: Blind unbelief is sure to err, And scan his work in vain; God is his own interpreter, And he will make it plain. ‘Sure’ to err: it is rare for Cowper to be so emphatic and so certain. The line has a note referring the reader to John 13: 7, when Peter questions Jesus as he approaches to wash Peter's feet: ‘Jesus answered and said unto him, What I do thou knowest not now; but thou shalt know hereafter.’ The hymn is about the limitations of human understanding, and the promise that one day all will be made clear: the last line expresses the final clarity with a simplicity that comes to rest beautifully on the word ‘plain’. Cowper's art throughout the hymn allows this plainness to emerge after a delicate and intricate exploration of the mystery of God. That word ‘mysterious’ dominates the first line, with its three syllables and its multiple meanings of God as unknowable, God as part of a mystery or holy art, and God as sacred, profoundly secret and holy. He is powerful, planting his footsteps in the sea (so that it goes up and down) and riding on the storm (perhaps from Sternhold's ‘On the wings of all the winds’ from Psalm 18); but he is invisible, and the bright designs that he treasures up are hidden. The intense movement of the sea and storm in verse 1 gives way to the stillness of the deep mines, where the bright designs presumably shine through the darkness (the hymn's title is ‘Light shining out of darkness’). Then come the clouds, which are big, but big with mercy, and shall break . . . in blessings. Both ‘big’ and ‘break’ are extraordinarily effective, and the placing of words here is delicate, almost a game with words as the breaking turns out to be a surprise—‘in blessings’. The hymn is full of such twists and turns, unexpected moments, straightening only at the end with God as his own interpreter (from Genesis 40: 8—‘Do not interpretations belong to God?’) making everything plain. And so from ‘mysterious’ in the first line, the hymn has worked through to ‘plain in the last. The hymn is extraordinarily assured, poised, and clever: Cowper's hymns sometimes reflect uncertainty, but at times they handle religious experience with a quiet confidence which is often deceptive. ‘Hark! my

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soul! it is the Lord’, for example, appears restrained within its seven-syllable couplets, but it uses the rhyme scheme and metre to generate a particular energy which comes from the dramatic situation. The poet tells his soul to listen, and the ensuing interchange is intense: Hark, my soul! it is the Lord; 'Tis thy Saviour, hear his word; Jesus speaks, and speaks to thee; ‘Say, poor sinner, lov'st thou me?’ The hymn versifies a favourite text for evangelicals, John 21: 16—‘lovest thou me?’ Jesus speaks these words to Peter three times, thus cancelling Peter's triple denial, and showing his infinite mercy and trust. It is a sublime yet very human moment in the gospel story, one that demonstrated for the evangelicals the depths of God's love for the repentant sinner; and the hymn enacts the wonderful persistence of that love in its use of repetition in sound and meaning. The first verse contrasts Hark, my soul! it is the Lord; which dramatizes Adam and Eve hearing the voice of God, and hiding from him with 'Tis thy Saviour, hear his word; The judge of Genesis 3 has become the Saviour of St John's gospel, the word made flesh who speaks in words of love. He speaks . . . and speaks: the hymn delicately repeats words to suggest perseverance, as the thrice-repeated ‘lov'st thou me?’ does. The sounds echo in the mind also: Hark . . . hear . . . Say .. . sinner. The phrase ‘poor sinner’ is doubly tender: the sinner is poor in goodness, but the phrase also suggests a generous pity—‘poor sinner’. All kinds of reason why the sinner should love God are then set out: I deliver'd thee when bound, And, when wounded, heal'd thy wound; Sought thee wand'ring, set thee right, Turn'd thy darkness into light. Cowper pushes the argument along, phrase by insistent phrase—‘wounded . . . wound’, ‘Sought thee . . . set thee’—in a process which reaches a climax in the fourth verse: Mine is an unchanging love, Higher than the heights above; Deeper than the depths beneath, Free and faithful, strong as death. Higher than heights, deeper than depths: from being the repetitions of a voice these alliterations now proceed to gesture towards the immeasurable. And the rhymes, which are so important in this hymn, show the contrast

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between love, which is above, and death, which is beneath: contrasts which are resolved in the person of Jesus Christ. The voice which speaks, and speaks again, tells the poor sinner of tremendous oppositions, of sin and love, of deliverance and bondage, of wounds and healing, depth and height, of human love that is weak and faint and divine love that is free and faithful. It is through such grace that we come to glory: Thou shalt see my glory soon, When the work of grace is done; This verse moves the hymn from a reminder of what has been done to a promise of what shall be: Partner of my throne shalt be, Say, poor sinner, lov'st thou me?' ‘Thou shalt see . . . [thou] shalt be’: these promises precede the repetition of the great question, to which the last verse is a response: Lord it is my chief complaint, That my love is weak and faint; Yet I love thee and adore, Oh for grace to love thee more! ‘Complaint’ is used here in its original sense of an expression of grief, a lament: it answers the question not with a resounding ‘yes’ but with this more touching humility. Then for the last time the repetitions emphasize the meaning: ‘my love . . . love thee . . . love thee more’. The soul can respond only with these gestures and hopes, and a prayer for grace; and yet the hymn is strangely intimate, a conversation with the Saviour which parallels the exchange between Jesus and Peter in the gospel. Closeness to God is the theme of the hymn which Cowper wrote during Mary Unwin's illness in December 1767: Oh! for a closer walk with God, A calm and heav'nly frame; A light to shine upon the road That leads me to the Lamb! For all its rhythmical assurance and stability, the verse implies distance, agitation, and the absence of light: the unattained hope is to walk with God, to be in daily communication with Him, a spiritual equivalent of the pleasure that Cowper had from his daily walks with Mary Unwin. His discovery that he no longer has the initial blessedness of the convert is one symptom of his agitation, which emerges in the next verses: he knows that he has to hate sin, but in his grief he also seems to think that he has to dispose of his ‘dearest Idol’. If this is his pleasure in the company of Mary

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Unwin, then it is a heavy price to pay, an example of the demands which his evangelical belief exacted from him. The final verse is that of a man purged of human attachments, looking for a mystic serenity: So shall my walk be close with God, Calm and serene my frame; So purer light shall mark the road That leads me to the Lamb. Although it looks like a walk round Olney, this really is a via dolorosa, a sad example of a religious passion which excludes the natural affections of humanity, anticipating some of the excesses of nineteenth-century hymns of selfsurrender; although it is not despair that possesses Cowper so much as inordinate zeal. His enthusiasm reaches its highest point of dramatic enthusiasm in ‘Praise for the fountain open'd’, which has a text from Zechariah 13: 1, but which begins with the New Testament Emmanuel: There is a fountain fill'd with blood Drawn from Emmanuel's veins; And sinners, plung'd beneath that flood, Loose all their guilty stains. The language, although taken from various scriptural texts, is shocking because it exploits the metaphor (found, for example, in Revelation 7: 13–17, where those in heaven ‘have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb’), pushing it towards the literal. The original metaphor of cleansing through blood is made more immediate, more vivid: the shock comes from being asked to contemplate a fountain of blood, with bodies immersed in it. It carries the pictorial representation of soteriological doctrine to an extreme, into a kind of evangelical baroque: and its justification is not, as Erik Routley would have us believe, that you need to be tough to be a Christian (‘Sin is not polite or polished, and the measures which God took for its redemption were not, in earthly terms, fit for fastidious minds to contemplate’400) but rather that it invites a fresh response, even a shocked one, to the familiar ideas of salvation and communion—‘This is my blood . . . drink this in remembrance of me’. In many ways Cowper is right to draw attention to the astonishing process, and his hymn treads the very edge of decorum in order to make its point (as Herbert does, too, in ‘The Agonie’). The startling verb ‘plung'd’, for example, suggests a total immersion (‘beneath’) which is involuntary (unless it is taken as ‘who have plung'd’) but remarkably physical: the singer has to accommodate the image of ‘swimming in blood’. Even the portrayal of the penitent thief is easier to contemplate than this:

400

Routley, I'll Praise My Maker, 95.

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The dying thief rejoic'd to see That fountain in his day; And there have I, as vile as he, Wash'd all my sins away. The last line is familiar evangelical territory, which underlines how important it was for the first verse to revivify the idea. The fountain is now the blood which came out of Jesus's side at the Crucifixion, thus linking the metaphors of fountain and sprinkled blood with the actual event of salvation; but the present participles in the verses that follow suggest an ongoing process rather than an historical event: Dear dying Lamb, thy precious blood Shall never lose its pow'r— E'er since, by faith, I saw the stream Thy flowing wounds supply— ‘I saw the stream’ and still do: Cowper's language is now one of a stream of blood from the ‘dying Lamb’, as though the sacrifice is taking place before his eyes and the blood is a flowing river. At this point of the hymn there has been a change from the general ‘sinners’ to the individual ‘I’, looking forward to the ‘blood-bought free reward’ of heaven, where the blood-process is left behind and the saved soul is given its prize— A golden harp for me! The naïvety is astonishing, part of the anthropological mode of this hymn, in which ritual processes of immersion and transformation take place, primitive in their significance and power. Cowper's theological system is a simple one. The golden harp is the ultimate end of grace on earth, as it was for Watts and Wesley (‘glory ends what grace begun’). To feel this as a natural progression was to be perpetually refreshed in the landscapes of the mind: In holy contemplation, We sweetly then pursue The theme of God's salvation, And find it ever new— and since Cowper was a walker in all seasons, delighting in the changing landscape at different times of the year, he saw emblems of Christ wherever he walked and in all the months. ‘I will praise the Lord at all times’ is one of his finest hymns, uniting as it does his love of nature and his sense of the presence of God (for Cowper, as Professor Newey has written, ‘to walk with nature is to walk with God’401):

401

Vincent Newey, Cowper's Poetry, 160.

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Winter has a joy for me, While the Saviour's charms I read, Lowly, meek, from blemish free, In the snow-drop's pensive head. The ‘charms’ of the Saviour (the word used by Doddridge and others402) are his meekness and lowliness, emblematized in the ‘pensive’ head of the snowdrop (‘pensive’ in the sense of hanging down). Then the springtime brings new life, as Christ did by his death, so that simultaneously the reader is presented with the ‘Life-invigorating suns’ and the sounds of the turtledove: Spring returns, and brings along Life-invigorating suns: Hark! the turtle's plaintive song, Seems to speak his dying grones! Summer has ‘a thousand charms’, and autumn speaks of mercy, of the smiling face behind the frowning providence: the beams of milder day Tell me of his smiling face. The frosty dawns of November are often red, and Cowper's imagination draws an astonishing parallel: Light appears with early dawn; While the sun makes haste to rise, See his bleeding beauties, drawn On the blushes of the skies. ‘Bleeding beauties’ is an astonishing oxymoron, complicated yet further by being spread over the skies: Isaac Watts's dying crimson is here found in the air and sky, the world transformed as Gerard Manley Hopkins was later to see it, into a drop of Christ's blood, ‘scarlet, keeping nevertheless mounted in the scarlet its own colour too’.403 From the conventional images of the different seasons showing different qualities of Christ's nature—meekness, light, warmth, mercy—suddenly the poem, in the same unhurried way, finds the red sky as an emblem of his passion. From this the final verse returns to peace and rest: having seen salvation in the bleeding beauties of the autumn sky, the poem proceeds to its nunc dimittis: Ev'ning, with a silent pace, Slowly moving in the west,

402

See J. R. Watson, ‘The Charming Sound of Eighteenth-Century Hymnody’, Bulletin of the Hymn Society, 197 (Oct. 1993), 263–6.

403

The Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Christopher Devlin, SJ (London, 1959), 194.

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Shews an emblem of his grace, Points to an eternal rest. The word ‘pace’ identifies one special quality of this hymn, its regular and unhurried rhythm, ending eventually in the two verbs, ‘Shews’ and ‘Points’, slowing the verse down to end delicately in ‘rest’. ‘I will praise the Lord’, says the title, ‘at all times’, and Cowper's ingenuity finds emblems in all the four seasons, and in morning and evening. His hymn is inclusive, complex, and intense, investing nature throughout the year with a significance that comes from a religious and feeling mind. That feeling mind is Cowper's most distinctive feature as a hymn-writer. His most painful worry is ‘to find I cannot feel’, and his hymns stand at the intersection of the Evangelical Revival with the age of sensibility. They were being composed at the same time as Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling (1771), the publication of which marked the high point of the cult of sensibility; and religious and ethical questions, in this period, became more and more associated with feeling, with the tender heart and the sensitive mind. Cowper's contribution to Olney Hymns is deeply engaged with these patterns of experience: he feels sin as something that makes him ashamed: Be mine the comforts that reclaim The soul from Satan's pow'r; That make me blush for what I am, And hate my sin the more. He blushes: the moment is wonderfully human and revealing, part of the many-sided pattern of Cowper's sensitivity. He rigorously examines himself, searching for false motives and chronicling his hopes and fears, worrying that even his prayers are contaminated with pride: My God! how perfect are thy ways! But mine polluted are; Sin twines itself about my praise, And slides into my pray'r. The serpent sin, twining itself round and sliding into prayer, also creeps: When I would speak what thou hast done To save me from my sin; I cannot make thy mercies known But self-applause creeps in. The predicament is that of Marvell in ‘The Coronet’; and such self-examination (one of his hymns is entitled ‘Selfacquaintance’) links Cowper not so much with Watts and Wesley as with the tradition of seventeenth-century devotional writing. In particular, his attempts to represent the inner weather of the human soul and his use of the dramatic mode sometimes

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echo Herbert. A hymn such as ‘The heart healed and chang'd by mercy’ is an eighteenth-century version of ‘The Collar’, less sharp in focus and more evangelical in tone but still powerfully dramatic. The poet repents of sin in verse 1, but he chooses ‘a legal course’ in which he tries to come to God through prayer, fasting, and striving— Till, despairing of my case, Down at his feet I fell: Then my stubborn heart he broke, And subdu'd me to his sway; By a simple word he spoke, ‘Thy sins are done away’. This direct speech, held back to the last line, is the equivalent of Herbert's ‘child’, simple but also profound, less resonant and meaningful than Herbert because more formulaic; but still with a reverberation that concludes the poem with a meaningful flourish. Olney Hymns was a product of its time, between the Wesleys and the Romantic movement; but in Newton's energy and Cowper's sensitivity it transcends the circumstances of its production—at least ‘sometimes’, to use Cowper's word. It proclaims salvation through the blood of Jesus Christ, but in the process it treats of storm and shipwreck, wretchedness and poverty, despair and hope, clouds and sunshine; and in its application of these to the human condition it transcends—not invariably, but not infrequently either—the limitations of its evangelical origins and the traditional formulas of evangelical doctrine.

12 The Romantic Period: Montgomery, Heber, Keble There is one Mind, one omnipresent Mind, Omnific. His most holy name is LOVE. Truth of subliming import! (Coleridge, ‘Religious Musings’) As we have seen, hymns were written during the second half of the eighteenth century which were designed to promote a certain style of worship by clergymen of a particular persuasion. Yet while hymn-writing was in one sense cutting itself off from English poetry (in a way that Watts, with his adventurous muse, would have deplored), in another way it was coming closer. Its mode of utterance, its expression of enthusiasm, and its energy of diction and punctuation, all had affinities with the development of English poetry in the Romantic period. The relationship has been studied effectively by Stuart Curran, in Poetic Form and British Romanticism, where he emphasizes the importance of the hymn as self-expression (related to Puritan spiritual autobiography), and discusses its affinity with the inspirational qualities of the Pindaric Ode.404 The Pindaric Ode was an important literary form at this time, found in writers such as Thomas Gray. Gray's The Bard (1757), with its figure of the inspired and defiant poet on the mountain top, provided a prototype for the Romantic poet-prophet: so does the first verse of the first chapter of Ezekiel, a chapter that was used by Blake and Coleridge: Now it came to pass in the thirtieth year, in the fourth month, in the fifth day of the month, as I was among the captives by the river of Chebar, that the heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God. The verse moves from earth to heaven: time, place, circumstances, captivity, are each chronicled to be transcended. The possibilities of such a transcendent vision are found in Charles Wesley (‘Where shall my

404

Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (New York, 1986).

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wond'ring soul begin?’) and also in the Romantic period poems that are actually called hymns, such as Coleridge's ‘Hymn before Sun-rise in the Vale of Chamouni’, and Shelley's ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’. Coleridge's hymn, in particular, is an ecstatic homage to the Creator:405 God! let the torrents, like a shout of nations, Answer! and let the ice-plains echo, God! God! sing ye meadow-streams with gladsome voice! Ye pine-groves, with your soft and soul-like sounds! And they too have a voice, yon piles of snow, And in their perilous fall shall thunder, God! Reginald Heber puts it less spectacularly, but the impulse and the thought are similar: The The The The

birds that wake the morning, and those that love the shade; winds that sweep the mountain or lull the drowsy glade, sun that from his amber bower rejoiceth on his way, moon and stars, their Master's name in silent pomp display.

This is valuable as evidence, not of any profundity (for the thought is simplistic, both in Heber and in Coleridge) but of a new kind of hymnic utterance, which has more in common with Addison and Watts than with its immediate predecessors. The hymn now becomes a song of inspired praise to the gods, or to God-like qualities (as in Shelley's poem); and the author is now closer to the prophet-poet of Ezekiel 1:1, caught in time and space, and a captive, but capable of seeing visions of God. He is no longer an egocentric, foul sinner, washed clean by the blood of the Lamb, but one who recognizes the importance of the inner spirit: Coleridge's later religious thought, for example, turns in Aids to Reflection towards transcendence and wonder, towards an inner reason which ‘irradiates’. That kind of Coleridgean reason had nothing to do with ‘evidences’ of Christianity, which Coleridge treated with a fine scorn: Evidences of Christianity! I am weary of the word. Make a man feel the want of it; rouse him, if you can, to the selfknowledge of his need of it; and you may safely trust it to his own Evidence.406 Coleridge's book originated in a commentary on the ‘beauties’ of the seventeenth-century Archbishop Leighton, who was seen by Coleridge as offering an alternative to Calvinism on the one hand and Methodism on the

405

Shelley's ‘Mont Blanc’ and his ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ are both, in different ways, counters to Coleridge's Christian nature-ecstasy. See J. R. Watson, ‘Shelley's “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” and the Romantic Hymn’, Durham University Journal, Shelley Special Issue (July 1993), ed. Michael O'Neill.

406

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aids to Reflection (The Collected Works, ix), ed. John Beer (Princeton and London, 1993), 405–6.

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other; and it is significant that William Howley (the Bishop of London with whom Heber corresponded about his hymns) formed a ‘MOST favourable opinion’ of Coleridge's work.407 Christian doctrine came to be for Coleridge a ‘reflection’ of the deepest self, and in the interpretation of Holy Scripture ‘the spirit beareth witness with our spirit.’ His confidence is in perception, not in salvation: in this, he becomes not a separated individual, part of a gathered church, but a more representative figure, closer in feeling and spirit to the major Romantic period poets (all of the hymnwriters in this section were friendly with Romantic poets, and were literary figures of some consequence). Religion and Christian belief become a matter of the inner life and of the working of the Holy Spirit rather than of conformity to Church practice: It is neither the outward ceremony of Baptism, under any form or circumstance, nor any other ceremony; but such faith in Christ as tends to produce a conformity to his holy doctrines and example in heart and life, and which faith is itself a declared mean and condition of our partaking of his spiritual Body, and of being ‘cloathed upon’ with his righteousness; that property makes us Christians.408 At the same time, the poets were writing in such ways that their work has sometimes been taken over and used in hymn-books. Blake's ‘And did those feet in ancient time’ is perhaps the best-known example, but Songs of Praise (admittedly a book given to including English poets of all kinds of belief or non-belief) has three other poems by Blake, and four verses from the end of Coleridge's ‘The Ancient Mariner’, with poems from Thomas Campbell, Thomas Moore, and (of all people) Shelley. The BBC Hymn Book and 100 Hymns for Today print a poem by John Clare. The result of this is that hymn-writing became less exclusive, and less the preserve of the evangelicals; and at the same time it is clear that patterns of worship were beginning to change, and that some clergymen were under pressure to include hymns in their services. Reginald Heber wrote in 1820 to the Bishop of London: Every clergyman finds that, if he does not furnish his singers with hymns, they are continually favouring him with some of their own selection; their use has been always the principal engine of popularity with the dissenters, and with those who are called the ‘Evangelical’ party.409 Heber was trying to stem the onward march of Dissent and extremism. Such practical considerations were allied to the new affinities with Romantic poets, as hymn-writing became more closly connected with conceptions of inspiration (often prophetic, in the Ezekiel sense) and of imagination.

407

Aids to Reflection, ed. John Beer, ‘Preface’, p. cx. The bishop was shown Coleridge's work by Sir George and Lady Beaumont, friends of Coleridge and the Wordsworths.

408

Ibid. 366.

409

Amelia Heber, The Life of Reginald Heber, D. D. (London, 1830), ii. 24.


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Imagination, in particular, becomes a crucial word, because for some poets it was associated with a poetic power that was seen as an emanation from the divine. It is this which introduces to hymnody, quite explicitly, the concept of the Sublime. Heber's ‘Holy, holy, holy’ is evidence of this; and John Bowring's hymn conducts the reader or singer inexorably to the significant adjective: In the cross of Christ I glory, Towering o'er the wrecks of time; All the light of sacred story Gathers round its head sublime. The subject-matter of hymnody becomes not salvation but adoration. This is perhaps too simple a formulation, but it serves to indicate a radical change in hymn-writing from the late eighteenth century to the early nineteenth. The principal preoccupations were no longer with the sinning self but with the providence of God in Creation and Redemption, as well as in Preservation: and what was evangelical experience becomes life experience, engaging with a much fuller range of human emotions, and aware of the complexities that are involved in them. As Wordsworth wrote in The Prelude: Ah me! that all The terrors, all the early miseries Regrets, vexations, lassitudes, that all The thoughts and feelings which have been infus'd Into my mind, should ever have made up The calm existence that is mine when I Am worthy of myself! Praise to the end! (1805 text, I. 355–61)A hymn such as Montgomery's ‘Go to dark Gethsemane’ is an expression of this kind of complex awareness: in addition to its dramatic portrayal of the Passion, it involves the reader in pleading to be taught a number of things—to pray, to undergo pain and loss, to die, and to rise again. Prayer is especially important, because it is the means by which life-experience is brought to God in all its fluctuating complexity. In addition to inspiration, which leads to praise, and experience, which leads to prayer, we may expect other features of Romantic period poetry to be found in the hymns of the period: a vivid sense of specific moments in the life of Christ (as Ezekiel had with his moments of vision, and as Wordsworth had with his ‘spots of time’), a love of nature and of beauty, and a recognition of the value of freedom. All of these qualities are found in the work of the major hymnwriters of the period. The greatest single example is the hymn by Sir Robert Grant: O worship the King, all glorious above; O gratefully sing His power and His love;

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Our Shield and Defender, the Ancient of Days, Pavilioned in splendour and girded with praise. Grant invests the vision of God with a chivalric grandeur (‘Pavilioned in splendour’), influenced perhaps by the dreams of the Middle Ages that were common at this time; but the hymn then turns to join that imagery (‘canopy’, ‘chariots’) to the majesty of nature— O tell of His might, O sing of His grace, Whose robe is the light, whose canopy space; His chariots of wrath the deep thunder-clouds form; And dark is His path on the wings of the storm. Throughout the hymn, the lines balance beautifully across the caesura, giving a sense of stability and control, as well as a necessary variety. The metre, a ten-syllable line divided by a heavy caesura, is that of William Kethe's version of Psalm 104 in The Whole Booke of Psalmes; and Grant has recaptured something of the original magnificence of the psalm, as well as his own sense of the goodness and mercy of God: Thy bountiful care what tongue can recite? It breathes in the air, it shines in the light, It streams from the hills, it descends to the plain, And sweetly distils in the dew and the rain. The images of nature which are used to illustrate God's bountiful care are rendered by a sequence of skilfully chosen verbs—breathes, shines, streams, descends, and finally the unexpected ‘distils’: the processes of nature are moving, breathing, descending like the mountain streams, and ‘sweetly’ distilling in morning dew and in life-giving rain. Grant's hymn is so beautiful in its Wordsworthian perception of an active, living universe, that it makes most hymns on the liber naturae, including those of Heber, quoted above, and Keble (‘There is a book, who runs may read’) seem pallid and perfunctory. Above all, however, it shows how the hymnody of salvation has become the hymnody of adoration: O measureless Might! ineffable Love! While angels delight to hymn Thee above, The humbler creation, though feeble their lays, With true adoration shall sing to Thy praise.

James Montgomery James Montgomery (born in 1771) was a near-contemporary of Wordsworth (b. 1770) and Coleridge (b. 1772), and he may justifiably be thought of as a significant poet of the Romantic period. He was friendly with Southey, who aroused the young Shelley's idealistic interest in him in


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1812.410 Shelley would have sympathized with Montgomery on two counts: he had been savagely reviewed by Francis Jeffrey in the Edinburgh Review (January 1807), and he had been sent to prison twice, once for publishing material in praise of the French Revolution, and once for criticizing the Sheffield police. Byron described him as ‘a man of considerable genius’ and thought that his poem, The Wanderer of Switzerland (1806), was ‘worth a thousand Lyrical Ballads’.411 Montgomery was a newspaper editor, a prolific poet, a reviewer, and a critic and writer of hymns. His introductory essay to The Christian Psalmist is, I think, the finest essay that has ever been written on hymns, combining a sound theoretical approach to hymn-writing with accurate and pithy assessments of his predecessors. In particular, it is illuminating to apply Montgomery's views on the structure of a hymn (quoted in Chapter 2) to his own work. A hymn should have, he writes, ‘a beginning, middle, and end’, and the thoughts should be well ordered: There should be a manifest gradation in the thoughts, and their mutual dependence should be so perceptible, that they could not be transposed without injuring the unity of the piece.412 Montgomery's hymns are very good examples of this theory put into practice, often ending in a flourish which neatly sums up the whole, and containing verses which frequently have a perceptible pattern and movement. His strict sense of proper structure is responsible for the splendid ordering of his hymns; but order without inspiration would be dull, and Montgomery's hymns were inspired by the same poetic energy that made him a well-recognized figure during a period of great poetry. He shared certain interests with his contemporaries: in nature, in childhood, in history and travel, in liberty and in national identity. He shared with them too a marked enthusiasm, what Hazlitt called ‘gusto’, which he first found in the hymns that were sung at his Moravian school at Fulneck, near Leeds: The hymns of the Moravians are full of ardent expressions, tender complaints, and animated prayers: these were my delight. As soon as I could write and spell I imitated them; and before I was thirteen, I had filled a little volume with sacred poems, though I was almost entirely unacquainted with our great English poets.413

410

The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck (London, 1965), viii. 229. Shelley was writing to Elizabeth Hitchener from Keswick on 2 January 1812: ‘You talk of Montgomery. We all sympathize with him, and often think and converse of him.’ Shelley had got hold of some story that Montgomery's parents had been murdered, and that he had had an unhappy experience in love. The letter goes on: ‘He is now a Methodist. Will not this tale account for the melancholy and religious cast of his poetry? This is what Southey told me, word for word.’

411

In a note to ‘English Bards and Scotch Reviewers’, line 418. Byron was, of course, deeply prejudiced against Wordsworth.

412

James Montgomery, The Christian Psalmist (Glasgow, 1825), pp. xiv–xv.

413

Jabez Marrat, James Montgomery, Christian Poet and Philanthropist (London, 1879), 13.

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Later reading made him familiar with the English poets, especially Milton; and his correspondence with Southey suggests that he came to know a good deal about English prosody. He certainly became conscious of good and bad practice: in Prison Amusements (written about his confinement in York gaol) he has a jaunty section entitled ‘The Pleasures of Imprisonment’ which contrasts bad books with those ‘Where sound is sense, and sense is sound’ (a line that contains two neat puns): But books there are with nothing fraught— Ten thousand words, and ne'er a thought; Where periods without period crawl, Like caterpillars on a wall, That fall to climb, and climb to fall; While still their efforts only tend To keep them from their journey's end.414 He had a considerable and unaffected admiration for his predecessors and contemporaries, quoting Pope, Cowper, and Wordsworth. It is very probable that Montgomery had read Wordsworth's 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, in which Wordsworth criticizes a sonnet of Gray and italicizes ‘the only part which is of any value’. Montgomery uses the same technique to point out James Merrick's verbosity, quoting from his version of Psalm 85: With mutual step advancing there, Shall Peace and Justice, heavenly pair, To lasting compact onward move, Seal'd by the kiss of sacred love. ‘Here it must be evident’, observes Montgomery sharply (with the eye of a newspaper editor, perhaps), ‘that the four words in italics, express the whole sense of the text, and that all the rest is garniture’.415 He was capable of writing with the most strict discipline himself; his paraphrase of the Lord's Prayer, for example, is economical in the extreme: Our heavenly Father, hear The prayer we offer now; Thy name be hallowed far and near, To Thee all nations bow. Thy kingdom come; Thy will On earth be done in love, As saints and Seraphim fulfil Thy perfect law above.

414

The Poetical Works of James Montgomery (‘The Lansdowne Poets’ edn., London, n.d.), 251. All quotations are from this edition.

415

The Christian Psalmist, p. vii.


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Similarly, his hymn for the Lord's Supper is simple in idea and chaste in its diction: Be known to us in breaking bread, But do not then depart; Saviour, abide with us, and spread Thy table in our heart. Perhaps because he was a busy man, a newspaper editor and public figure in Sheffield, his hymns never waste time. They are invariably to the point, and sometimes extremely brisk, concentrating on the essentials. As a result, they have what Mrs Barbauld, the author of Hymns in Prose, called ‘an earnestness, a fervour of piety, and an unmistakable sincerity which goes straight to the heart’: In style, too, you are perfectly successful, and it is one in which few are masters. Clear, direct, simple, yet glowing with poetic fire, and steeped in Scripture. Not in its peculiar phrases so much, which might give an air of quaintness, but filled with its spirit.416 Montgomery's art is therefore competent technically, the work of an accomplished poet who knew what he was doing, inspired with a religious fervour, and strictly disciplined. Its other principal feature is its broad orthodoxy, its refusal to be bound by the stereotypes of late eighteenth-century hymnody, with the emphasis upon grace. Montgomery rescued hymnody from the ‘blood of the Lamb’ school; in its place, there is a sense of religion as practising and promising happiness in a world of struggle and pain: Montgomery's hymns never evade difficulties, but they have a buoyant sensibility which links the Christian life on earth with the communion of saints in heaven. Montgomery is the poet of a Christian experience which is full of vigour and inspiration but which is never self-dramatizing. There are occasional references to the blood of Christ, such as the Communion hymn beginning: Communion of my Saviour's blood, In Him to have my lot and part; To prove the virtue of that flood Which burst on Calvary from His heart; and another hymn is entitled ‘A Fountain Opened for Sin and Uncleanness’. But these are the exceptions that prove the rule: of course Montgomery does not ignore the blood of Christ at the Holy Communion, but he links it, as George Herbert does, with human experience: Love is that liquor sweet and most divine, Which my God feels as bloud; but I, as wine. (‘The Agonie’)

416

Quoted in Marrat, James Montgomery, 31.

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Montgomery is often close to Herbert in subject-matter and treatment, because each has his sacred poetry firmly rooted in a Christian experience that is mindful of human error and sensitive to the providential goodness of God. In addition, Montgomery's hymns often seem energetic and buoyant because of the trochaic rhythm which he employs: Hark! the song of Jubilee— Songs of praise the angels sang— Bright and joyful is the morn, For to us a Child is born;— The vigour of these hymns is Montgomery's response to the wickedness of this world, which he never underestimates: How few and evil are thy days, Man of a woman born! Trouble and peril haunt thy ways:— This hymn, based on Job 14, is one of the few to follow Toplady: Man lieth down, no more to wake Till yonder arching sphere Shall with a roll of thunder break, And Nature disappear. Oh! hide me till Thy wrath be past, Thou who canst kill or save; Hide me, where hope may anchor fast,— In my Redeemer's grave. Montgomery is often aware of ‘life's perplexing path’ (‘The Christian Israel’), but his response to this is robust: ‘Stand up and bless the Lord’. In particular, he has a Herbert-like sense of three things: the central importance of prayer; the life and person of Jesus Christ; and the processes of individual and collective belief. Each of these is rooted in Montgomery's poetic awareness of human experience, which springs (I suggest) from his practice as a Romanticperiod poet. The most distinctive example of this is in his treatment of prayer.

Prayer Montgomery is the greatest hymn-writer on the difficult subject of prayer. He understands that it is central to the Christian life, and that without it (in Peter Baelz's words) ‘Christian discipleship lapses into moral endeavour’.417 Prayer is a complex, fluctuating relationship with God that occurs either in the silence of inarticulate longing, or in speech:

417

Peter Baelz, Does God Answer Prayer? (London, 1982), 1–2.


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Prayer is the soul's sincere desire, Uttered, or unexpressed; The motion of a hidden fire That trembles in the breast. Prayer is the burden of a sigh, The falling of a tear; The upward glancing of an eye When none but God is near. This is a list of attributes which illuminate, one after another, the many-sided experience of prayer. In this sense it follows George Herbert's sonnet, ‘Prayer’, which has a series of images, each of which holds a profound truth which is revealed as the implications of each phrase are unfolded—‘the church's banquet’, ‘angel's age’, ‘reversed thunder’, ‘God's breath in man returning to his birth’. Montgomery simplifies and expands, losing some of Herbert's taut power but retaining some of his ingenious insight. His hymn is Herbert's ‘soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage’, a desiring, a moving of a hidden fire, a sighing, a weeping, a looking upward. The tear falls, the eye looks up: the downwards/ upwards movement is reminiscent of ‘Prayer’, sounding the depths and storming the heavens. Herbert's sonnet explores every opening, just as prayer is part of ‘a living and growing relationship with God that extends into every corner of life’.418 In that relationship, inarticulate longing gives way to speech: Prayer is the simplest form of speech That infant lips can try; Prayer the sublimest strains that reach The Majesty on high:— The contrast now is between further opposites—the prattle of children, the most sublime statements: the one is touching, the other awe-inspiring, and both are valid forms of prayer, as they are for Herbert (‘Heaven in ordinaire, man well drest, | The milkie way, the bird of Paradise’). Similarly, both writers see prayer as a necessary part of the Christian's life on earth, and as a way to heaven: Prayer is the Christian's vital breath, The Christian's native air; His watchword at the gate of death,— He enters heaven with prayer. Herbert's God's breath in man' becomes ‘vital breath’, and his ‘sinners towre’ is now gently expanded to become the process of repentance and return to God (the pattern of Adam and Eve's experience in Paradise Lost):

418

Ibid. 16.

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Prayer is the contrite sinner's voice, Returning from his ways; While angels in their songs rejoice, And cry, ‘Behold he prays!’ The quotation is a neat allusion to the newly converted Paul (Acts 9: 11), and the word ‘returning’ suggests the parable of the Prodigal Son. Paul's sense of the community of Christians, with fellowship in the Gospel (Philippians 1: 5) is found in the next verse: The saints in prayer, appear as one In word, and deed, and mind; While with the Father, and the Son Sweet fellowship they find. With consummate skill, Montgomery then moves, as Herbert does, from earth to heaven, and then back to earth. He reminds us that ‘the Spirit maketh intercession for us’ (Romans 8: 26, 27) and that Christ himself does also (Romans 8: 34): Nor prayer is made on earth alone: The Holy Spirit pleads; And Jesus, on the eternal throne, For mourners intercedes. But then the hymn turns back to earth, delicately remembering the life of Christ (John 14: 6) and his own praying in the Garden of Gethsemane. Christ's experience of human life, and his own prayerful agony, lead to the totally appropriate conclusion of the final line: O Thou by whom we come to God, The Life, the Truth, the Way! The path of prayer Thyself hast trod; Lord, teach us how to pray! The last line is beautifully simple, a neat conclusion, and also a clever use of Luke 11: 1—‘Lord, teach us to pray’—which Montgomery dexterously fits into the metre to conclude a verse which fuses human experience and the life of Christ. And if the hymn begins by telling us what prayer is, it ends by being a prayer itself. The end of this hymn is the beginning of another, which is again dependent upon human experience, in this case the universal problems associated with prayer—asking God for the wrong things, having impure motives, making a dubious confession, getting pleasure out of being penitent. This is ‘Lord, teach us how to pray aright’, entitled ‘The Preparations of the Heart in Man’. The psalmist was wrestling with these problems in Psalm 51, and Montgomery uses that psalm throughout: it is a searching reminder of how difficult prayer is, and how necessary it is too:


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Lord, teach us how to pray aright, With reverence and with fear; Though dust and ashes in Thy sight We may, we must draw near: We may, and we must: the problem is that we need help, so that Montgomery introduces a neat reminder of others who did, the disciples on the road to Emmaus: ‘Lord, meet us by the way’. It is an eloquent testimony of prayer as a relationship with God: but as in all true relationships, it requires honesty, and the avoidance of self-deception: God of all grace! we come to Thee, With broken, contrite hearts; Give, what Thine eye delights to see, Truth in the inward parts: This verse contains two quotations from Psalm 51, not only the reminder that ‘a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise’ (verse 17) but also ‘Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts’ (verse 6). Yet the psalm is transformed by being ‘Christianized’: the ultimate remedy for the difficulties of prayer is to concentrate on the person of Christ— To cast our hopes, to fix our eyes, On Christ—on Christ alone: This is to come close to the techniques of the mystics, but in the final verse Montgomery characteristically turns back to the world: Patience to watch, and wait, and weep, Though mercy long delay; Courage our fainting souls to keep, And trust Thee, though Thou slay: Give these,—and then Thy will be done; Thus strengthened with all might, We, by Thy Spirit and Thy Son Shall pray, and pray aright. The last line returns us to the first with Montgomery's characteristic sense of form: but between the first and last lines there has been a steady and penetrating analysis of prayer, with a powerful subtext that involves a sharp awareness of what it is to pray wrongly. The echo of the Lord's Prayer—‘and then Thy will be done’—is a reminder that Christ gave instruction in the matter; but the watching and waiting and weeping are a testimony, too, to the human experience that prayer springs from.

The Life of Christ Montgomery's prayer hymns are searching examinations of human religious behaviour: the second of them is addressed to Christ—‘O Thou who

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hearest prayer’, as the title of another hymn has it. That hymn begins with the majesty of God—‘Thou, God, art a consuming fire’—but turns in the third verse to Christ as intercessor: Between the Cherubim of old Thy glory was expressed; But God, through Christ we now behold In flesh made manifest: Through Him who all our sickness felt, Who all our sorrows bare, Through Him in whom Thy fulness dwelt, We offer up our prayer. Jesus is no longer the bleeding Lamb of evangelical hymnody, but the Saviour who is fully human, yet having within himself the fullness of God (Ephesians 3: 19, Colossians 2: 9). God is for Montgomery fully human and divine, the God of Providence and Grace (another hymn title), Creator and Redeemer. It is subtly emphasized in the Christmas hymn: Angels, from the realms of glory, Wing your flight o'er all the earth; Ye, who sang creation's story, Now proclaim Messiah's birth: Come and worship, Worship Christ, the new-born King. The angels sang the story of the Creation (Job 38: 7); Montgomery's link with the Incarnation was provided by Milton in Paradise Lost, where God announces his intention of creating the earth: Great triumph and rejoycing was in Heav'n When such was heard declar'd the Almightie's will; Glorie they sung to the most High, good will To future men, and in thir dwellings peace:—(VII. 180–3) Milton's use of the Christmas story at this point is a brilliant one, which is skilfully picked up by Montgomery, and used in reverse. In Milton, the angels' song of Creation looks forward to the Incarnation; in Montgomery's hymn, the angels of the Incarnation look back to the loving purposes of God from the beginning. The Incarnation thus becomes a crucial historical moment, and the important word (in verses 1 and 2) is ‘now’: God with man is now residing; Yonder shines the Infant Light: The light is in the stable: God is now with us, Emmanuel. So those who wait and watch for him shall at last be satisfied:


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Saints, before the altar bending, Watching long in hope and fear, Suddenly the Lord descending In his temple shall appear:— After the procession of addressees at the beginning of each verse—Angels, Shepherds, SagesMontgomery ends with saints and sinners, the saints longing for the coming of the Lord, the sinners putting their trust in the Christmas hope which is foreshadowed by the Christmas psalm, Psalm 85 (‘Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other’): Sinners wrung with true repentance, Doomed for guilt to endless pains, Justice now revokes the sentence, Mercy calls you,—break your chains: Come and worship, Worship Christ, the new-born King. Montgomery, like Milton, looks forward and back, increasing the significance of one event by seeing it in the context of others, and seeing the entry of Christ into human history as the transformation of a fallen world. It is this process of radiant transformation which is found in Montgomery's paraphrase of Psalm 72: Hail to the Lord's Anointed! Great David's greater Son! Hail, in the time appointed His reign on earth begun! He comes to break oppression, To let the captive free; To take away transgression, And rule in equity. This is David's prayer for Solomon, widely interpreted as a type of Christ's kingdom. It takes up the story where ‘Angels, from the realms of glory’ leaves off: the image of the freed captive echoes the breaking of chains (both show Montgomery's debt to Charles Wesley's physical metaphors). The winter of the fallen world turns to spring, and here Montgomery's apprenticeship as a Romantic period poet is again significant: He shall come down like showers Upon the fruitful earth; And love, joy, hope, like flowers, Spring in his path to birth. Before Him, on the mountains, Shall Peace, the herald, go; And righteousness, in fountains, From hill to valley flow.

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The welcome for spring after winter is found in Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads, and most powerfully of all in Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, where the captive is set free, the chains broken, and life-giving spring comes to warm the earth. It is not possible to find specific verbal echoes of Shelley in the hymn, but it is perhaps significant that Prometheus Unbound was published in 1820 and Montgomery's paraphrase was written in 1821. The hymn is concerned with the final triumph of Christ, the coming of his kingdom of love, as the last lines remind us. They are a typical Montgomery flourish, a final snap to close the hymn: His name shall stand for ever: That name to us is—Love. This is reminiscent of Charles Wesley's ‘Wrestling Jacob’, especially in Montgomery's earlier version—‘His name—what is it? Love.’ To obtain this final triumph, however, Christ has first to suffer and die, before rising again. This is the subject of Montgomery's most dramatic hymn, a solemn and reflective account of the passion, which begins with a most evocative use of a name: Go to dark Gethsemane, Ye that feel the tempter's power, Your Redeemer's conflict see: Watch with him one bitter hour. Turn not from his griefs away: Learn of Jesus Christ to pray. The economy of this verse compels attention, from the imperative in the first line to the ‘Turn not . . . Learn’ of the last couplet. The description is brief and allusive—dark Gethsemane, the bitter hour—but the hymn also draws the reader into the experience: as with ‘Angels from the realms of glory’, description gives way to participation—‘Watch with him . . . Turn not away’. The reader is present at every stage: Follow to the judgment-hall; View the Lord of Life arraigned. Oh, the wormwood and the gall! Oh, the pangs His soul sustained! Shun not suffering, shame, or loss: Learn of him to bear the cross. Between the two sets of commands—to follow and view, and then to shun not and learn, are the exclamations of horror, beautifully placed to capture the suffering through the ‘Oh’ of the appalled beholder (the suffering is unspecified, and the horror is all the more powerful for being just an exclamation). The steady beat continues, with another evocative word to follow ‘Gethsemane’:


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Calvary's mournful mountain climb; There, adoring at his feet, Mark that miracle of time,— God's own sacrifice complete. ‘It is finished!’ hear Him cry: Learn of Jesus Christ to die. Each verse in the hymn links the stages of the Passion to the religious experience of human life—temptation in verse 1; pain and bereavement in verse 2; and death in verse 3. Christian doctrine, of course, teaches that death is not the end of the story, and Montgomery's last verse beautifully completes the pattern: Early hasten to the tomb Where they laid His breathless clay. All is solitude and gloom: Who hath taken Him away? Christ is risen;—He meets our eyes; Saviour, teach us so to rise. The hymn has precisely that beginning, middle, and end of which Montgomery (and Aristotle) spoke: its effect is partly owing to its perfect and economical form, and partly owing to its use of understatement and allusive language. The language produces its effect by what it does not say, by allowing the reader to remember the horrors (from the biblical accounts) rather than have them described again. The echoes of Charles Wesley are clear, not only in the phrase ‘sacrifice complete’ but also in the use of imperatives; but Wesley would never have used place-names so effectively, nor would he have produced verses with the insistent imperatives that are found here. In those imperatives are found huge elements of human experience: sorrow, temptation, dying, rising again. This ability to encompass a great deal of human experience with a few words is a broad-brush technique that Montgomery uses: it allows him to say a great deal in a small space by a dexterous use of allusion. The best example of this is the brisk ‘Songs of praise the angels sang’, in which verse after verse catalogues the great stages of world history—the Creation (verse 1), the Incarnation and Redemption (verse 2), the Day of Judgement (verse 3). It is an amazing overview, astonishing and sublime in its rapidity; and then the hymn makes humanity enter this huge process of history, somewhere before the last stage has begun (the ‘No’ is characteristic of Montgomery's use of dialogue in his hymn-writing, which is one of the stylistic features that sets him apart from the others): And will man alone be dumb Till that glorious kingdom come? No;—the Church delights to raise Psalms and hymns, and songs of praise.

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Saints below, with heart and voice, Still in songs of praise rejoice; Learning here, by faith and love, Songs of praise to sing above. Montgomery's view of the Church, with its congregation of gathered saints, looks back to that of Watts and the seventeenth-century Dissenters, practising on earth for what they will do in heaven. It is this continuing tradition of believers, of those engaged in the Christian life, either collectively or individually, which forms the third great theme of Montgomery's hymnody.

The Christian Life Like Charles Wesley, Montgomery sees the Church as a part of the communion of saints: Command Thy blessing from above, O God! on all assembled here; Behold us with a Father's love, While we look up with filial fear. This prayer-imperative is repeated in each of the first three verses, addressed to God, to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. As in his ‘prayer’ hymns, Montgomery sees a relationship between heaven and earth, God beholding and humanity looking up. It is found again in ‘Preparation for Heaven’, where life in heaven is seen as The sum of all that faith believed, Fulness of joy and depths of bliss, Unseen, unfathomed, unconceived. But just as earth is a preparation for heaven, so heaven can give point and purpose to life on earth. We understand the one through the other: While thrones, dominions, princedoms, powers, And saints made perfect triumph thus, A goodly heritage is ours; There is a heaven on earth for us. The Church of Christ, the school of grace— Montgomery's love of the Church is shown in his hymn about Sunday worship, entitled ‘For the Morning of the Sabbath’. It devotes one verse to singing hymns of praise, another to prayer, another to hearing the lessons, and another to the preaching of the word. In Montgomery's best style, it runs nimbly through the different features of worship, such as the lessons: While I hearken to Thy law, Fill my soul with humble awe,


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Till Thy Gospel brings to me, Life and immortality. Once again, one of the pleasures of the hymn is its form, the perfect adaptation of the verses to one another and to the whole. The conclusion draws on Cowper's image of walking with God, ending the hymn with a typical flourish: From Thy house when I return, May my heart within me burn; And at evening let me say, ‘I have walked with God to-day.’ This is the expression of an ideal Christian experience of worship: at the end of the day, having sung, prayed, listened to the Bible, and heard good sermons, the believer feels a satisfaction, a divine content. The importance of such experiences, and of the Church as a whole, is continually emphasized. So is the importance of Sunday. ‘The Lord's Day’ anticipates Ellerton's ‘The day thou gavest’ in its global awareness, and I suspect that Ellerton knew it: People of many a tribe and tongue, Men of strange colours, climates, lands, Have heard Thy truth, Thy glory sung, And offered prayer with holy hands. Soon as the light of morning broke O'er island, continent, or deep, Thy far-spread family awoke, Sabbath all round the world to keep. From east to west, the sun surveyed, From north to south, adoring throngs; And still, when evening stretched her shade, The stars came out to hear their songs. The last enchanting line is a compelling and imaginative vision, suggesting that the stars come out one by one, like bystanders, to listen to the sound of worship coming from earth. That sound is of a universal harmony: in Montgomery's vision of all the nations united in worship, one after another as dawn breaks, he even tackles the problem of language: Harmonious as the winds and seas, In halcyon hours, when storms are flown, Arose earth's Babel languages In pure accordance to Thy throne. The language problem disappears in a ‘pure accordance’, as the worship of the world in many tongues arrives at the throne of God, the accidental

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differences of vocabulary and syntax lost in the sublime sense of prayer and praise devoted to one end. Meanwhile, the fight on earth has to go on, with the Church Militant doing battle against the forces of destruction. Montgomery's hope is in the Cross, which is taken into battle, much as the banner of St Cuthbert was taken into battle by the medieval Bishops of Durham. So Psalm 24 is turned into a war cry: Lift up your heads, ye gates of brass; Ye bars of iron, yield; And let the King of Glory pass; The cross is in the field. A holy war his servants wage, Mysteriously at strife; The powers of heaven and hell engage For more than death or life. The astonishing word here is ‘Mysteriously’, which at once turns the conflict into a spiritual struggle, with a bold adverb; the army, too, is not an ordinary one: Ye armies of the living God, His sacramental host, Where hallowed footstep never trod Take your appointed post. Words such as ‘Mysteriously’ and ‘sacramental’ transform this hymn from being a paraphrase of Psalm 24 into an interpretation of it in a transcendental mode. It is a remarkable piece of Romantic period hermeneutics. Although he does not ignore the ills of earth, and the problems of human sin, Montgomery writes continually about heaven: he regards human life as a preparation for a life above. The tension between the ideal and the actual, which was the subject of so much of the poetry of his own time—in Blake, Shelley, and Keats especially—is resolved in his poetry by the sense of an ultimate destiny, promised and delivered by the Saviour. This is what gives meaning to existence: so that Montgomery's busy life as newspaper editor and poet was given significance by its place in the greater order of things, where saints below and saints above are united in universal harmony: In one fraternal bond of love, One fellowship of mind, The saints below and saints above Their bliss and glory find. It is this idea which gives force and point to Montgomery's great hymn on death, ‘Anticipations of Heaven’, which begins ‘For ever with the Lord’. It is the longing for heaven that gives shape and point to human life:


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My thirsty spirit faints To reach the land I love, The bright inheritance of saints, Jerusalem above. In that heavenly Jerusalem, the Babel tongues of earth are overpowered by the choral harmonies of heaven, as though the one drowns out the other, imperfection giving way to perfection, the actual to the ideal. Yet that ideal is paradoxically the ultimate reality: By death I shall escape from death, And life eternal gain. Knowing as I am known, How shall I love that word! And oft repeat before the throne, For ever with the Lord! The last line repeats the first in a typical Montgomery flourish, bringing us back to where we began, but with a deeper understanding of what the phrase might mean. It is life from the dead, immortality: above all, it is the goal of life, that which gives point and purpose to the Christian experience. It is that experience which marks out all Montgomery's poetry, never so movingly as in this hymn: Here in the body pent, Absent from Him I roam, Yet nightly pitch my moving tent, A day's march nearer home. The soul is on pilgrimage, and the image of the moving tent can refer us back to the children of Israel who were passing through the wilderness. Yet Montgomery complicates that image wonderfully: first, by introducing the idea of the soul ‘pent’ in the body, a Platonic idea which is here given Christian form, as the body is ‘Absent from Him’, the Lord. In its journey to be with God, the body roams, which suggests a lack of direction; but Montgomery counters this by remembering that, however complicated the route, he will at last arrive at home. In the process, he pitches his tent nightly nearer God: the movement is not in place but in time. He may go to bed in the same room, yet each night he is one day further on in the journey, so that he is, in time, nearer to God and to his death. Once again I think Montgomery is using experience in a remarkable and very moving way: in the days of beds with curtains, going to bed each night must have been very like sleeping in some kind of tent. And Montgomery reflects upon this, uses it, and in so doing he turns a moment of everyday experience into a complex and subtle statement of Christian experience.

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Above all, perhaps, Montgomery's hymnody expresses a certain wholeness. As Coleridge had described the poet as one who ‘described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity’,419 so Montgomery's hymns suggest a complete doctrine and a full celebration of it. It is found in the self-analysis of prayer, of which Montgomery is the greatest master after Herbert; and in the self-abandonment of praise. The angels sang their songs of praise, and human beings should too, in an abundant sense of life and energy that Wordsworth and Coleridge would have recognized. It is found, conclusively, in the epigraph to The Christian Psalmist, which is taken from Richard Baxter's The Saint's Everlasting Rest: The liveliest emblem of Heaven that I know upon earth is, when the people of God, in the deep sense of his excellence and bounty, from hearts abounding with love and joy, join together, both in heart and voice, in the cheerful and melodious singing of his praises. This is the spirit which is found in ‘Songs of praise the angels sang’ and ‘Angels from the realms of glory’, that spirit of overflowing praise from heaven that is answered on earth in a harmony of love and joy.

Heber and Milman Reginald Heber, and his friend Henry Hart Milman, were both distinguished clergymen of the Church of England: Heber ended up as Bishop of Calcutta, and Milman as Dean of St Paul's. Their interest in hymn-writing is a sign that it was beginning to enter the mainstream of Anglican worship, rather than being associated with Evangelicals and Nonconformists. Heber and Milman are important in the history of hymnody, because they helped to make hymns respectable. They did so not only by virtue of their high offices, but also through the impassioned dignity of their hymns, and through the connection of those hymns with the regularity and Christian order of the Church's year. When Heber began publishing his hymns in the Christian Observer in 1811, he described them as ‘part of an intended series, appropriate to the Sundays and principal holydays of the year, connected in some degree with their particular Collects and Gospels, and designed to be sung between the Nicene Creed and the sermon’.420 Heber had clearly thought about the function of hymns in the service (allowing the preacher time to get into the pulpit); and there is all the difference in the world between Christopher Smart's imaginative treatment of the Church's year and these practical and direct hymns. They were to have a certain propriety, too: ‘No fulsome

419

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (The Collected Works, vii), ed. James Engell and W. J. Bate (Princeton and London, 1983), ii. 15–16.

420

Heber, Reginald Heber, i. 371.


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language has been knowingly adopted’, wrote Heber; ‘no erotic addresses to him whom no unclean lips can approach; no allegory, ill understood and worse applied.’421 He had a strong sense of the dignity and majesty of God, and a dislike of familiarity in addressing the Deity (anticipating the doctrine of Reserve and the Oxford Movement): When our Saviour was on earth, and in great humility conversant with mankind; when He sat at the table, and washed the feet, and healed the diseases of His creatures; yet did not His disciples give Him any more familiar name than Master or Lord. And now, at the right-hand of His Father's majesty, shall we address Him with ditties of embraces and passion, or in language which it would be disgraceful in an earthly sovereign to endure?422 His writing was a sustained attempt to restore dignity to hymn-singing. When reading a popular hymn-book (he does not give the title) he was, he said, ‘shocked and scandalized at many things which I found, and which are detestable, not in taste only, but, to the highest degree, in doctrine and sentiment’.423 His hymns, therefore, are fervent, but their fervour is measured: the sprinkled blood, the cleft rock, the bleeding wounds disappear, to be replaced by a much more controlled enthusiasm and a more restrained hermeneutics, in which the Bible was a different kind of sourcebook. At the same time, Toplady's and Wesley's ‘for me’ disappears, to be replaced by a more decorous congregational plural: Oh Saviour, whom this holy morn Gave to our world below; To mortal want and labour born, And more than mortal woe! Incarnate Word! by every grief, By each temptation tried, Who lived to yield our sins relief, And to redeem us died! The language makes its own demands, encouraging the reflective mode by holding back the main verb until the third verse: If gaily clothed and proudly fed, In dangerous wealth we dwell; Remind us of Thy manger bed, And lowly cottage cell! The hymn is an exhortation not to repine. It is characteristic of Heber's sense of the goodness of God and of a human dependence on Him, not expressed in salvific terms but as having consequences for human living. His hymns are exhorting the people to good conduct and a proper appreciation

421

Ibid. 371.

422

Ibid.

423

Ibid., ii. 24.

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of the benevolence of the Creator; one consequence of this is that they tend to preach. Heber read widely in contemporary poetry, reviewed Byron's work, and was friendly with Southey and Scott. It is not surprising, therefore, that his hymns should have reflected the delight in the natural world that is found in the poetry of the period. But the verse quoted above, beginning ‘When spring unlocks the flowers to paint the laughing soil’, shows the limitations of Heber's hymnody. The metaphors are trying too hard, and the personification of earth is distracting: the verse lacks the imaginative fusion that is found in Montgomery's ‘Hail to the Lord's anointed’, the ‘making into one’ or esemplastic power that Coleridge defined as the poetic imagination. Heber is more successful on a smaller scale: By cool Siloam's shady rill How sweet the lily grows! How sweet the breath beneath the hill Of Sharon's dewy rose! Here the magic of the place-names—the lily of Siloam, the rose of Sharon—counters the simplicity of ‘How sweet . . . How sweet’. In the next verse, however, the doctrine separates off: Lo! such the child whose early feet The paths of peace have trod; Whose secret heart, with influence sweet, Is upward drawn to God! This tendency to preach, to extract a message from the situation, spoils Heber's hymnody; and it is another way in which he looks forward to some later nineteenth-century hymns. Not only did he make hymns respectable for the Church of England: he made them overtly didactic. It is this which destroys the beauty of his celebrated missionary hymn: From Greenland's icy mountains, From India's coral strand, Where Afric's sunny fountains Roll down their golden sand; From many an ancient river, From many a palmy plain, They call us to deliver Their land from error's chain! The magic of place-names is again evident: the glimpses of different countries are simple, rendered by adjective and noun, line by line, separate and vivid like the pictures in a child's map of the world. But the last two lines, while showing all too clearly why Heber felt that he had to accept the See of Calcutta, twist the verse away from description towards exhortation. The second verse, similarly, begins with description but mixes it with reflection:


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What though the spicy breezes Blow soft o'er Ceylon's isle, Though every prospect pleases, And only man is vile: In vain with lavish kindness The gifts of God are strown, The heathen in his blindness Bows down to wood and stone! The geography is charming, but the sentiments (to a twentieth-century reader) are unacceptable: the split between the beauty of description and the patronizing contemplation of the heathen is an extreme example of Heber's method. The division which occurs everywhere in his work, the description and the moralizing, is an example of the process which Coleridge described as ‘Fancy’, the aggregative faculty which adds elements together rather than fusing them.424 An obvious instance may be found in Heber's hymn for the Epiphany, which begins so beautifully and obliquely by addressing the star which guided the Magi: Brightest and best of the sons of the morning! Dawn on our darkness and lend us Thine aid; Star of the East, the horizon adorning, Guide where our infant Redeemer is laid! The second verse steps closer, with delicate detail: Cold on His cradle the dew-drops are shining, Low lies His head with the beasts of the stall; Angels adore Him in slumber reclining, Maker and Monarch and Saviour of all! These two verses allow the final line in each case to carry the doctrine without fuss and with a pleasing clarity. But then Heber begins to preach: Say, shall we yield Him, in costly devotion, Odours of Edom and offering divine? Gems of the mountain and pearls of the ocean, Myrrh from the forest or gold from the mine? The answer, of course, is no: dearer to God are the prayers of the poor. This is unexceptionable, but also commonplace, and a dull conclusion to the radiant epiphanic vision of the first two verses. From this dreary homily, Heber has to rescue the hymn by going back to the first verse, and his poetic tact in so doing is considerable: he returns to the images of the guiding star and the breaking dawn, with all their suggestions of light coming out of darkness.

424

See Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ch. 13.

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The darkness which is dispelled is characteristic of Heber, for whom ‘dark’, ‘darkness’, ‘darker’, and ‘darksome’ were favourite words.425 As a concept, darkness has an important part to play in his Advent hymns which emphasize the end of the world and the Last Judgement: In the sun and moon and stars Signs and wonders there shall be; Earth shall quake with inward wars, Nations with perplexity. Soon shall ocean's hoary deep, Toss'd with stronger tempests, rise; Darker storms the mountains sweep, Redder lightning rend the skies. This is the poetic equivalent of a landscape by John Martin. It is an indication of Heber's very Romantic-period obsession with the Sublime, which in some hymns overcomes the tendency to preach, with commendable results: Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty! Early in the morning our song shall rise to Thee: Holy, holy, holy! merciful and mighty! God in three persons, blessed Trinity! The second line suggests a congregation in church: as in Ezekiel 1: 1, the hymn is beginning with time and place and circumstance, and ending in mystery and wonder. Heber contrasts the earthly worship with the endless majesty and magnificence of the Holy Trinity, using Revelation 4: 6—‘And before the throne there was a sea of glass like unto crystal’. William Law, in The Spirit of Love (1752–4), had turned this into ‘a glassy sea’, and Heber uses the same phrase to indicate heavenly, as opposed to earthly, worship: Holy, holy, holy! all the saints adore Thee, Casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea; Cherubim and Seraphim falling down before Thee, Which wert and art and evermore shalt be! Holy, holy, holy! Though the darkness hide Thee, Though the eye of sinful man Thy glory may not see, Only Thou art holy, there is none beside Thee, Perfect in power, in love, and purity! The hymn uses not only the imagery of Revelation but also the ideas of the Sublime found in eighteenth-century and Romantic theory.426 Burke's association

425

‘Dark’, ‘darker’, and ‘darkness’ are common words in Heber's hymns: (Advent 2, Advent 3, Epiphany, Epiphany 4, Good Friday, Whitsunday, Trinity Sunday, Trinity 2, 3, 16, 19, 21, 24, and elsewhere).

426

See Samuel H. Monk, The Sublime (New York, 1935).


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of the Sublime with obscurity is exactly represented in Heber's ‘Though the darkness hide Thee’; ‘there is none beside Thee’ is a representation of the Romantic Sublime. The ecstatic tone of the hymn, found in its rhythms, repetitions, and three-fold statements, is also associated with the Sublime. It moves through a series of attributes—Almighty, merciful, mighty; which wert, and art, and evermore shalt be—in praise of the God in three persons, blessed Trinity. This is the central attribute, and the central mystery: an approach to its three-fold nature can best be achieved by the use of triple words or constructions. The most important of these is ‘Holy, holy, holy!’, the traditional Sanctus from the Holy Communion; but it also finds its expression in other forms—power, love, and purity; earth and sky and sea. Against the triples there is a contrasting pattern of twos and fours—the four-line stanzas, the doubles—Cherubim and seraphim, merciful and mighty—which hold and accentuate the threes by contrast. The most dramatic of these is the opposition between earth and heaven, between sinful man and the purity of the Holy Trinity. It is conveyed in the reminder that ‘Only Thou art holy’, but also in the contrast between the early morning church-goers in verse 1 and the whole worshipping creation in verse 4—‘All Thy works shall praise Thy name in earth and sky and sea’. The reference is to Revelation 5: 13, with its vision of heaven: Heber has produced a hymn in which the normal processes of human sin are acknowledged but transcended in worship and praise. It turns hymnody into a kind of mantra, with ‘Holy, holy, holy!’ as a spell, much as Coleridge has used it in Aids to Reflection, where he attacked Descartes as one who— instead of a World created and filled with productive forces by the Almighty Fiat, left a lifeless Machine whirled about by the dust of its own Grinding: as if Death could come from the living Fountain of Life; Nothingness and Phantom from the Plenitude of Reality! The Absolutness of Creative Will! Holy! Holy! Holy!427 This mode of sublime address is also found in Henry Hart Milman's best-known hymn, ‘Ride on! ride on in majesty!’, which was written for Heber's collection. ‘Your Advent, Good Friday, and Palm Sunday hymns have spoilt me for all other attempts of the sort’, wrote Heber; ‘a few more such hymns and I shall neither need nor wait for the aid of Scott and Southey.’428 The Palm Sunday hymn depends for its effect on the irony of the event: the ‘majesty’ of the first line of each verse is only visible to the eye which is prepared to salute the meek Saviour as the ultimate conqueror. Christ rides on in ‘lowly pomp’, a brilliant oxymoron to include the figure on the ass and the response of the people (‘Hark! all the tribes Hosanna cry’). The lowly pomp is the episode itself, which is seen as the beginning of the final drama:

427

Aids to Reflection, ed. John Beer, 400–1.

428

Heber, Reginald Heber, ii. 40–9.

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Ride on! ride on in majesty! In lowly pomp ride on to die; O Christ, Thy triumphs now begin O'er captive death and conquer'd sin. The first act of Holy Week is seen in the context of the final outcome, the human scene against its divine meaning. Milman sees the Palm Sunday procession as watched by the tribes of Israel, but also by the angels, who Look down with sad and wondering eyes To see the approaching Sacrifice. This process is going to be one which astonishes even the angels; only God the Father seems to know what will happen, and awaits the outcome with apparent calm: Ride on! ride on in majesty! The last and fiercest strife is nigh: The Father on His sapphire throne Awaits his own Anointed Son. God seems curiously detached from the struggle and brutality of the Passion, as Milman's allusive verse sets up the most dramatic distance between Son and Father (which has its origins in the Agony in the Garden, and Christ's cry from the Cross). The final verse, however, stresses the orthodox ‘I and the Father are one’, by reminding the reader or singer that the Christ who bows the head (from Herbert's ‘The Sacrifice’) is the God who will ultimately reign: Ride on! ride on in majesty! In lowly pomp ride on to die; Bow Thy meek head to mortal pain, Then take, O God, Thy power, and reign! At this point it becomes apparent that Milman's most remarkable achievement in the hymn is to place the spectator in the middle of the event, watching Jesus ride into Jerusalem at a specific and dramatic moment in his earthly career. It is a hymn in which the reader or singer is plunged in medias res, but which also allows an astonishing vision of earth and heaven—the crowds in Jerusalem, the events later in the week, but also the angels in the sky, and (above all) God, awaiting the predestined outcome and ‘preventing’ what will happen with the workings of Divine Providence. In combining these into one hymn, Milman has created a most unusual combination of narrative and the Sublime.

John Keble Montgomery and Heber, in their different ways, turned hymn-writing from an art from for an Evangelical and Dissenting minority to an art which had


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something in common with the hopes and aspirations of other Romantic period poets, with Christian experience and inner response. Their poetry included sacred poems as well as hymns, and they brought the two genres closer together: the process was completed by Keble, who published The Christian Year in 1827. Keble's work, as Newman said, ‘did that for the Church of England which none but a poet could do: he made it poetical’.429 He completed the process begun by Montgomery and Heber, of making hymnody respectable and popular; he also drew it, as they had done, away from Evangelicalism into a more central Christian experience. Echoing Cowper's poem on the solitude of Alexander Selkirk, Keble thought of ‘the glorious art of Poetry’ as ‘a kind of medicine divinely bestowed upon man’: which gives healing relief to secret mental emotion, yet without detriment to modest reserve: and, while giving scope to enthusiasm, yet rules it with order and due control.430 Poetry was no longer the handmaid of piety, as John Wesley had seen it; it came from God, and had its own healing power. The title of Keble's lectures as Professor of Poetry at Oxford (from which this quotation comes), which were given in Latin and remained untranslated until 1912, was Praelectiones Academicae, ‘De Poeticae Vi Medica’, which suggests that poetry is good for the soul, healing, or cathartic (to use Aristotle's word). There was, in Keble's theory, ‘a hidden tie of kinship’ between Poetry and Theology,431 and ‘Religion freely and gladly avails itself of every comfort and assistance which Poetry may afford’.432 Poetry and religion worked together for good to them that love God, in ways that would have been recognized by Coleridge, who wrote of Hebrew poetry (as opposed to Greek) where each Thing has a Life of it's own, & yet they are all one Life. In God they move & live, & have their Being—not had, as the cold system of Newtonian Theology represents/but have.433

429

John Henry Newman, ‘Keble’, in Essays Critical and Historical (London, 1872), ii. 442. This astonishingly bold essay, written in 1846 in the first enthusiasm of Newman's conversion, argues that the Roman Catholic Church is the most ‘poetical’ of all churches, and suggests that Keble's rightful place may be within it.

430

Keble's Lectures on Poetry, 1832–1841, trans. Edward Kershaw Francis (Oxford, 1912), i. 22. Keble's poetic theories have recently received renewed attention by critics such as M. H. Abrams, in The Mirror and the Lamp (New York and London), 1953; and Stephen Prickett, Romanticism and Religion (Cambridge, 1976). Abrams sees Keble's theory of poetry as ‘relief for the over-burdened mind’ as ‘a radical, proto-Freudian theory, which conceives literature as disguised wish-fulfilment, serving the artist as a way back from incipient neurosis’ (p. 157). See Prickett's discussion, pp. 108 ff.

431

Ibid., ii. 479.

432

Ibid., ii. 480.

433

Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs (London and New York, 1956–71), ii. 865–6.

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Coleridge was identifying a unifying of experience into poetic perception, which would disallow the mechanical processes of allegory, and the rigid interpretation or application of symbols. Keble thought the same way: Poetry lends Religion her wealth of symbols and similes: Religion restores these again to Poetry, clothed with so splendid a radiance that they appear to be no longer merely symbols, but to partake (I might almost say) of the nature of sacraments.434 This view of the high and sacramental nature of poetry was fundamental to the development of hymnody. During the nineteenth century it became no longer an expression of enthusiasm or of salvation, but part of a process of poeticizing religion, making religion beautiful. It had something in common with church restoration, which (however unfortunate its results) began in a desire to make the place of worship more expressive of the holiness that should be found there. It is no accident that a hymn such as ‘O worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness’ should have been written during the nineteenth century: the concept is one which Keble would have understood. It was in this spirit that he dedicated the Praelectiones, published in 1844, to William Wordsworth, ‘true philosopher and inspired poet’ who by the special gift or calling of Almighty God whether he sang of man or of nature failed not to lift up men's hearts to holy things— ‘In perilous times’, the dedication went on, Wordsworth was ‘a chief minister, not only of sweetest poetry, but also of high and sacred truth’. Beauty and holiness went together, and they were the more precious because they had to survive in an inimical age. Keble saw the Church of England, and the Book of Common Prayer, as having to fight against a sickness in society and in thought. These were ‘times of much leisure and unbounded curiosity, when excitement of every kind is sought after with a morbid eagerness’, as he says in the ‘Advertisement’ to The Christian Year. The aim of the book was to work as a medicine, a kind of sedative, against such eager excitement, using the Prayer Book and writing poems for every Sunday and holy-day of the Christian year: and as Matthew Arnold was later to warn his scholar-gipsy against contemporary society, ‘with its sick hurry, its divided aims’, and as Newman was to hope for rest from ‘the fever of life’, so Keble hoped that his poems would exhibit ‘that soothing tendency in the Prayer Book’. His poetry shows the same tendency to think of life as a fever (from Macbeth): In Life's long sickness evermore Our thoughts are tossing to and fro: We change our posture o'er and o'er, But cannot rest, nor cheat our woe. (‘Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity’)

434

Keble's Lectures, ii. 481.


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In this context the idea of soothing becomes an important part of the nursing process: medical metaphors for society's illnesses abound, and Keble was one of those who saw poetry as giving ‘healing relief ’. Beside the sick bed of nineteenth-century religion, Keble's voice was calm and quiet: Bless'd are the pure in heart, For they shall see our God, The secret of the Lord is theirs, Their soul is Christ's abode. ‘The secret of the Lord is theirs’: the relationship between the pure in heart and God is that of a secret, whispering closeness. Its secrecy is intimate, not to be spoken of loudly. Keble was practising a poetic technique later associated with the idea of Reserve, formulated by Isaac Williams, a prominent member of the Oxford Movement, in Tracts 80 and 87 (1838 and 1840 respectively). The Doctrine of Reserve, as it later came to be called by the Tractarians, required the majesty and holiness of God to be respected and spoken of quietly, not blazed abroad (as Milton's metrical psalm had suggested). In Lecture V of the Praelectiones, Keble dealt with this idea in a discussion of what he called ‘Primary Poetry’ (poets who ‘write from the heart’): One most essential feature of all poetry is a due reserve, which always shrinks from pouring forth everything, worthy or unworthy, without selection or modesty. A certain reverence must be observed: as with sacred things, so here, everything must be touched upon with due reserve.435 Reverence and reserve became fundamental characteristics of what G. B. Tennyson has called ‘Tractarian Poetics’.436 Keble opposed them to what he saw as tactless irreverence on the part of those who would ‘chatter lightly of sacred things’: Reverence for the eternal power, if it is genuine and springs from inmost feeling, not only shuns too great publicity for itself, but also, should any one, forgetting a true reticence, chatter lightly of sacred things, seeks in some way or other to withdraw from him and keep him at a distance . . . Certainly the early Fathers of the Church who were specially fitted to be defenders of pure religion insisted that every care must be taken lest opponents and mockers should attain knowledge of Sacramental mysteries and the key-words of the faith.437 There are mysteries and secrets, but some are chosen to be trusted with them:

435

Ibid., i. 257.

436

See G. B. Tennyson, Victorian Devotional Poetry (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1981), ch. 2.

437

Keble's Lectures, i. 73–4.

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Still to the lowly soul He doth himself impart, And for His cradle and His throne Chooseth the pure in heart. God ‘imparts’ himself: the words are deliberately vague, mysterious in more than one sense, appropriate to the secrecy of the true believer. Similarly, the phrase ‘pure in heart’ suggests a hidden, inner purity, unknown to the casual observer. Keble's poems create a sense of such privileged reticence: the readers are those who are within the safe harbour of the Church of England, protected by the Prayer Book, Sunday by Sunday: Oh! timely happy, timely wise, Hearts that with rising morn arise! These hearts are ‘timely’ within the scheme of Christian time, and each day has its role to play in allowing the soul to flourish: New mercies, each returning day, Hover around us while we pray; New perils past, new sins forgiven, New thoughts of God, new hopes of Heaven. In this pattern of Christian existence, the day is for prayer, for thanksgiving, for forgiveness, for thoughts of God and hopes of heaven. Keble turns all hours, days, months, seasons, into sacred time, with nature as Christian and the seasons as Anglican. So ‘Tuesday in Easter Week’ is subtitled ‘To the Snow-Drop’: Is there a heart, that loves the spring, Their witness can refuse? Yet mortals doubt, when Angels bring From Heaven their Easter news: Similarly, friendship is a friendship among the religious (not with those who chatter lightly of sacred things, of course): Old friends, old scenes, will lovelier be, As more of heaven in each we see:— while work becomes Room to deny ourselves; a road To bring us, daily, nearer God. The plainness of this is highly appropriate, and very effective (Keble would have read Wordsworth on poetic diction). It works by reticence and understatement: Only, O Lord, in thy dear love Fit us for perfect Rest above;


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And help us, this and every day, To live more nearly as we pray. How we pray is unclear: the hope is evidently to bring our lives into line with our Christian hopes, but Keble gently but firmly declines to be more specific. His poetic practice here corresponds with his theory about what he called ‘the very essence of Poetry’, in which the poet's deepest and most intimate feelings do not indeed lie wholly hidden, but do take refuge as it were in a kind of sanctuary, behind a veil, and shrink from the full light of day.438 Sometimes Keble seems to be open, but this is an illusion. In the poem for Septuagesima Sunday, with its awkward first line, the meaning appears to be open to all, but recedes into the same kind of intimacy and secrecy: There is a book, who runs may read, Which heavenly truth imparts, And all the lore its scholars need, Pure eyes and Christian hearts. Is that all? one is inclined to ask; and what kind of heavenly truth is ‘imparted’ (the same word as in ‘Bless'd are the pure in heart’) to such people? Nature, the liber naturae, is here available, but to the right readers only. Those who look for God in nature will find him there, in a graceful example of the hermeneutic circle: The works of God above, below, Within us and around, Are pages in that book, to show How God himself is found. The works of God show God, but only to those who have pure eyes and Christian hearts, who are looking to find God in the created world. The circular movement is characteristic of Keble: those who seek shall find, but those who seek do so with the Book of Common Prayer in their hands, and they find a way of life which is with God in the perfection of Anglican time: As for some dear familiar strain Untir'd we ask, and ask again, Ever, in its melodious store, Finding a spell unheard before; Such is the bliss of souls serene, When they have sworn, and steadfast mean, Counting the cost, in all to'espy Their God, in all themselves deny. (‘Morning’)

438

Ibid., ii. 97.

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In this process, the Church itself becomes strangely important as the centre of the Christian life: The Moon above, the Church below, A wondrous race they run, But all their radiance, all their glow, Each borrows of its Sun. (‘Septuagesima Sunday’) The correspondence is a neat one, curiously linking the moon and the Church through this property of borrowed light: it is as if Keble were rewriting ‘The Ancient Mariner’ as an Anglican allegory. The hymn-texts taken from The Christian Year are usually made by selecting verses from longer poems (and in ‘Bless'd are the pure in heart’ by selecting two verses and adding others by a later author).439 They were not intended as hymns, but have become well known as such. Their plainness and reticence, together with what was thought of Keble's character, have made them beloved of the admirers of a quiet and tenacious Anglicanism; and The Christian Year as a whole gave encouragement to all those nineteenth-century writers—Adelaide Anne Procter, Dora Greenwell, F. W. Faber, John Ellerton, Sir H. W. Baker, H. F. Lyte, Frances Ridley Havergal—who aspired to write sacred poems or poetic hymns (who produced what Louis F. Benson called the ‘Literary Hymn’440). Keble was influential in other ways also. His ‘Hail, gladdening Light’, from the Greek, was one of the first nineteenthcentury attempts to use ancient hymnody, in this case Greek; and his Lyra Innocentium (1846) is one of the earliest books for children (he had been slightly involved, earlier, with Frances Mary Yonge's The Child's Christian Year, published in 1841, to which he contributed four hymns and a stiff and reticent preface). Among the curiosities of his later work are three ‘Hymns for Emigrants’, written at the request of the Emigration Commissioner, and printed in the first edition of Prayers for Emigrants: Thine everlasting Creed Is ours, to say in time of need; We waft the name from coast to coast, Father, and Son, and Holy Ghost. The hymns were omitted from later editions, ‘perhaps’, as Keble's editor wrote, ‘as being thought not sufficiently simple for the class of people for

439

The usual text includes two verses (1 and 3) from Keble's poem (of seventeen verses) on ‘The Purification of St Mary the Virgin’, and two other verses first printed in Psalms and Hymns adapted to the Services of the Church of England, published in 1836 (commonly known as ‘The Mitre Hymn-Book’), ed. W. J. Hall and E. Osler.

440

Louis F. Benson, The English Hymn (London, 1915), 435.


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whose use the Book of Prayers was chiefly intended’.441 It is possible, too, to speculate that the Creed may have been unsuitable for the emigrants because it was too Churchy; certainly the poem which Hardy parodied in ‘The Darkling Thrush’ at the end of the century suggests this. Keble's poem is entitled ‘To a Thrush Singing in the Middle of a Village, Jan 1833’, and it describes the thrush's song as taking the hearer back to an innocent childhood: That simple, fearless note of thine Has pierced the cloud of care, And lit awhile the gleam divine That bless'd his infant prayer; Ere he had known, his faith to blight, The scorner's withering smile; While hearts, he deem'd, beat true and right, Here in our Christian Isle. The ‘Christian Isle’ is Britain, but it is difficult to avoid the impression that it is Keble's England, home of the parish church and the Book of Common Prayer. And Hardy's mordant poem (the word is G. B. Tennyson's442) points to Keble's limitations, his filtering of experience through the system and practice of his belief in the Church. As his editor, George Moberly, wrote, ‘it is the characteristic of Keble's poetry to be in a very high degree the reflex of himself ’.443 One could say the same thing about Hardy, of course; but Keble's poetry is true to his Church, whereas Hardy's is true to an agnostic self which is deeply aware of tragedy. When Keble writes about suffering, in the Passiontide poems of The Christian Year, he becomes shrill and artificial: ‘Fill high the bowl, benumb His aching sense ‘With medicin'd sleep.’—O awful in thy woe! The parching thirst of death Is on Thee, and Thou triest The slumb'rous potion bland, and will not drink. This is from ‘Tuesday before Easter’, on the text ‘They gave him to drink wine mingled with myrrh: but he received it not. St Mark xv. 23’. It sounds oddly artificial for a follower of Wordsworth, but its clumsiness is revealing: Keble is at his best not when writing about the spectacular events of the Christian year, but when he is describing a certain style of Christian living—reverent, influenced by the doctrine of Reserve, withdrawn from the hurly-burly

441

‘Preface’, Miscellaneous Poems by the Rev F. Keble, M.A. (London, 1869), p. vi. The editor was George Moberly, Bishop of Chester.

442

Tennyson, Victorian Devotional Poetry, 134. Tennyson has a most informative discussion of the career and influence of The Christian Year in Appendix C to his book, pp. 226–32.

443

‘Preface’, Miscellaneous Poems, p. xvi.

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of nineteenth-century eagerness and excitement. Moberly thought that the strength of Keble's writings lay in ‘their intense and absolute veracity’,444 and in that he was almost certainly correct: but it was a veracity which soothed because it avoided problems, which healed because it offered the Prayer Book as a sedative. Just as Wordsworth offered the figure of the Recluse as a necessary counter to the age, so Keble offers the ordinary, quiet member of the Church of England, the inhabitant of a Christian Isle, as a pattern for living in the nineteenth century. As Newman saw, The Christian Year ‘kindled hearts toward his Church; it gave a something for the gentle and forlorn to cling to’.445 It is little wonder that it became the most popular poetry of the nineteenth century; nor that it completed the process, begun by Heber and Milman, of bringing sacred poetry into the heart of the Church of England.

444

‘Preface’, Miscellaneous Poems, p. xvii.

445

Newman, ‘Keble’, Essays Critical and Historical, 445. Newman also wrote: ‘Clear as was his perception of the degeneracy of his times, he attributed nothing of it to his Church, over which he threw the poetry of his own mind and the memory of better days’ (p. 444).

13 The Victorian Hymn No one who has considered the subject can doubt that, in our age, poetry in the form of hymns is being furnished for the use of the Church in a degree unknown, or known but rarely, in earlier days. (W. Garrett Horder, The Hymn Lover, 1889) The nineteenth century saw itself as reaching new heights in hymnody. Josiah Conder, writing in 1836, distinguished between James Montgomery's work and that of his eighteenth-century predecessors, whom he clearly regarded as primitive: He must be a bold man, if not a wise one, who would attempt to improve the compositions of Mr Montgomery; but it would be absurd to feel a similar delicacy with regard to the rude and homely compositions of Hart and Cennick.446 This observation is significant, not only as evidence of the high regard in which Montgomery was held, but also as suggesting a new sense of refinement, a hymnody which saw itself as radically different from the ‘rude and homely’ work of the Evangelical Revival. The book from which it comes, The Congregational Hymn Book: A Supplement to Dr Watts's Psalms and Hymns (1836), is itself an interesting development: Watts's hymns, by now accorded classic status among Congregationalists, were to be varied by new material. The resources for worship were to be increased; and while there had been earlier attempts to provide supplements in other Nonconformist denominations,447 this one by Conder had the imprimatur of a committee set up by the Congregational Union. The committee was anxious, according to the preface, to represent that side of hymnody which has been noted as a fundamental feature of the Romantic-period hymn:

446

Josiah Conder, ‘Preface’, The Congregational Hymn Book: A Supplement to Dr Watts's Psalms and Hymns (London, 1836), p. vii.

447

The principal example was John Rippon's Selection of Hymns from the Best Authors, intended as an Appendix to Dr Watts's ‘Psalms and Hymns’, published in 1787. This collection by a well-known Baptist minister went through many editions until its final form as the ‘Comprehensive’ edition of 1844. See John Julian, A Dictionary of Hymnology (London, 1892), 964.

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It was the opinion of the Committee, that a great deficiency of hymns of praise and adoration characterizes most of our modern Collections, and that our Psalmody is in some danger of being too much diverted from its primary purpose, by the introduction of so large a proportion of metrical compositions of a descriptive, sentimental, or didactic character,—instructive and edifying in themselves, but not in the form or spirit of either prayer or praise.448 Conder's hymn-book, an excellent and catholic selection, is evidence of a striking enthusiasm among some congregations for the use of hymns for worship, which is corroborated by Reginald Heber's letter to the Bishop of London, quoted above, in which Heber remarks on ‘the fondness of the lower classes for these compositions’ and notes that ‘if he [a clergyman] does not furnish his singers with hymns, they are continually favouring him with some of their own selection’.449 The Methodists and Unitarians led the way: the Methodists by adding hymns in supplement after supplement to the Wesley Collection of 1780, so that the original 525 hymns in 1780 had reached 551 by 1804 and 769 by 1831; the Unitarians by producing local collections for individual chapels in different towns—Bristol, Birmingham, Norwich, London, Liverpool.450 Similarly the Baptists used Rippon's Selection, Gadsby's Hymns, John Curtis's The Union Collection of Hymns and sacred Odes, additional to the Psalms and Hymns of Dr Watts (1827), and The General Baptist Hymn Book (1830). A list of published books between the years 1821 and 1850 suggests that collections of hymns appeared at the rate of about two a year, with no fewer than ten coming out in 1833.451 Such energetic activity soon began to affect the worship of the Church of England, even in the country parishes, as the early writing of George Eliot makes clear. In ‘The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton’, in particular, later published in Scenes of Clerical Life, the situation is described in some detail. George Eliot (who was born in 1819) set the story in the time of her

448

‘Preface’, Congregational Hymn Book, pp. iii–iv.

449

Amelia Heber, The Life of Reginald Heber, D.D. (London, 1830), ii. 24. See previous Chapter.

450

Some examples from the Library of Manchester College, Oxford, include A Collection of Psalms and Hymns for Public Worship unmixed with the Disputed Doctrines of any Sect (Warrington, 1788); Hymns for Public Worship, selected for the use of the Congregation assembling in the Octagon Chapel. Norwich (2nd edn., London, 1826); A Selection of Psalms and Hymns, used in their Public Worship, by the Society of Christians, assembling in the new Meeting House, Birmingham (Birmingham, 1830) (presumably the ‘new Meeting House’ replaced the one burnt down in the time of Joseph Priestley); A Collection of Hymns for Christian Worship, Dublin: printed for the Congregation of Eustace Street (Dublin, 1831); A Selection of Hymns for Christian Worship (supplementary to the Collection used by the Congregation of Renshaw Street Chapel, Liverpool) (Liverpool, 1836) (supplementing a volume ‘compiled eighteen years ago’); A Collection of Hymns for Public Worship and for the Private Exercise of the Religious Affections, by Lant Carpenter, Ll.D. (Bristol, 1838); A Selection of Hymns and Psalms for Christian Worship, by H. E. Howse (4th edn., Bath, 1839); A Sunday Manual, used at the Chapel in Beaumont Square. Mile End Old Town (London, 1840).

451

Julian, Dictionary of Hymnology, 334–6, provides this information, with a list of published hymn-books.

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youth, looking back with some affection to an earlier age from the middle of the Victorian period. In that earlier age, in Shepperton church, ‘the innovation of hymn-books was as yet undreamed of ’: even the New Version was regarded with a sort of melancholy tolerance, as part of the common degeneracy in a time when prices had dwindled, and a cotton gown was no longer stout enough to last a lifetime; for the lyrical taste of the best heads in Shepperton had been formed on Sternhold and Hopkins.452 The vicar, Mr Gilfil, ‘an excellent old gentleman, who smoked very long pipes and preached very short sermons’, was succeeded by a zealous Evangelical preacher, and ‘the hymn-book had almost superseded the Old and New Versions’; at this time ‘Evangelicalism and the Catholic Question had begun to agitate the rustic mind with controversial debates’, and clearly there was a great deal of religious tension and energy about (which George Eliot views with a certain amused irony). In due course arrived the Revd Amos Barton, who was a modernizer, against metrical psalms and ‘all for the hymns’. He stopped the singing of the wedding-psalm for a newly married couple, called for silence, and then ‘gave a hymn out himself to some meeting-house tune’. He upset Mr Farquhar by setting a hymn to the tune LYDIA, which was associated with the Independent chapel.453 George Eliot was writing fiction, and so she should not be taken as providing hard evidence. However, she protested (in Adam Bede and elsewhere) that she was telling the truth, and certainly there is evidence that Amos Barton's tactless authoritarianism had its origins in George Eliot's recollections of the Revd John Gwyther, who was appointed curate of Chilvers Coton in 1831, and who was recorded in her father's diary as having ‘stopd the Singers’ in February 1832.454 Clearly, this was a time of considerable agitation, in worship as well as in belief; and a major element of controversy seems to have been the introduction of new hymns and new tunes. Hymns had been (in Louis F. Benson's words) ‘the badge of dissent’;455 now they were making their way into every part of the Church, including the Church of England. The prejudice against Dissent, which George Eliot observed in the villagers of Shepperton, may be found in the preface to Henry Alford's Psalms and Hymns adapted to the Sundays and Holydays throughout the Year, an imitation of Heber which was published in 1844. Alford, who is chiefly remembered for the harvest hymn ‘Come, ye thankful people, come’, described what he called ‘The restless and morbid tone of feeling prevalent among sectarian bodies’, but was not averse from using their sacred poetry:

452

George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life (Edinburgh, 1895), 5.

453

Ibid. 10, 21.

454

Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (Oxford, 1968), 211–12.

455

Louis F. Benson, The English Hymn (London, 1915), 497.

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The Editor has endeavoured to adhere, as much as possible, to the compositions of churchmen; but he has not considered himself bound altogether to reject those of dissenters, provided they are found to be in accordance with the spirit of the Church. The command given in Numbers xvi. 38, will surely justify us in using for sacred purposes that which has been offered to the Lord, even though in error or sin.456 Numbers 16: 38 speaks of ‘sinners against their own souls’, who have nevertheless made offerings to the Lord (it was not a charitable way to think about Dissenters, but at least they were now allowed to contribute); similarly, Josiah Conder, writing not long after Catholic Emancipation, clearly excluded Roman Catholics from his view: ‘Protestant Christians, who differ about more important matters, can still agree in their hymns of prayer and songs of praise’,457 he wrote, implying that non-Protestants were different. Among Protestants, Conder sought to find a kind of universal harmony, in which all denominations could join: The productions of Bishops Ken and Heber, of Wesley and Toplady, of Doddridge and Hart, Cowper and Newton, Fawcett and Beddome—Episcopal clergymen, Moravians, Wesleyan Methodists, Independents, and Baptists,—all harmoniously combining in this metrical service,—prove that ‘by one Spirit we are all baptized into one body’, and that there actually exists throughout that body ‘a Communion of Saints’.458 In this fine ecumenical spirit, Conder was one of the first anthologists to use Charles Wesley. It would seem that Wesley's hymns were the object of some suspicion, to judge from their absence from many hymn-books, with the exception of ‘Hark, the herald angels sing’, which was one of the first to be widely anthologized. They began to be more widely used in Edward Bickersteth's Christian Psalmody (1833), and later in William Mercer's The Church Psalter and Hymn Book (1854). Conder thought Wesley prone to excess, one of those eighteenth-century hymn-writers who needed improving (and Conder tried his hand at at least one major hymn): he was ‘one of the most beautiful of our sacred poets’ but he was ‘often bold, careless, and unequal to an extreme, and requires a pruning hand’.459 The readiness of Conder, and even of Alford, to use the work of other denominations is significant evidence of the perceptible widening of the stream of hymnody. From its beginnings in Dissent and Evangelicalism, to its tentative adoption by some elements in the Church of England, hymn-writing at the beginning of the Victorian period became suddenly important

456

Henry Alford, ‘Preface’, Psalms and Hymns adapted to the Sundays and Holydays throughout the Year (London, 1844), pp. iii–iv.

457

The Congregational Hymn Book, 1836, preface, p. x.

458

Ibid., p. x.

459

Ibid., p. vii. Conder's alteration (which would have satisfied John Wesley) is found in the change from ‘Jesu, lover of my soul’ to ‘Jesu, refuge of my soul’.

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to all Protestant churches. The number of hymn-books increased enormously, and their use in worship became widespread. At the same time, it ceased to be necessary to reprint the ‘Old Version’ of Sternhold and Hopkins, after nearly three hundred years. The new replaced the old, and into the new mode—which reached its fulfilment and apogee in Hymns Ancient and Modern of 1861—came many elements from different traditions. The first may be described as the continuation of the hymnody of praise and prayer from the Romantic period. Of this, the most distinguished early Victorian example was Henry Francis Lyte, who produced The Spirit of the Psalms in 1834 (revised edition, 1836); some examples were immediately snapped up by Josiah Conder for use in The Congregational Hymn Book. Lyte began a long tradition of Anglican hymnody that is one of the most distinctive features of nineteenthcentury worship. The second was that of ancient hymnody, from Latin first and then Greek, and subsequently from the Eastern Church. This was chiefly associated with the work of John Mason Neale and Edward Caswall, but it should not be divorced from the Oxford Movement, of which it was an expression. It played a very distinctive part in the new hymnody, providing a resource that was at once old and new. To these must be added the important new source of German hymnody, translated by Frances E. Cox, Catherine Winkworth, and others. Like ancient hymnody, German hymnody had not been unknown, and John Wesley translated some notable examples, as we have seen; but the strong Calvinist impetus of the Reformation Church had tended to obscure the Lutheran tradition of folk-song and hymn, and in the nineteenth century the range and mood widened, as the vast possibilities of German hymnody began to be explored. The fourth distinctive tradition which added to the rapidly growing resources of hymn-singers was the emergence of the woman writer. There had been some women hymn-writers—‘Mrs Rowe’, ‘Mrs Tollet’460—in books of sacred poetry; and, of course, the prime example in the eighteenth century was the work of Anne Steele, ‘Theodosia’, who proclaimed her femininity in her pseudonym but who was not followed by any other significant woman hymn-writers (although the Countess of Huntingdon may have written hymns, and certainly produced hymn-books for her ‘Connexion’). In the nineteenth century, women hymn-writers became much more important, contributing what came to be regarded as a particular ministry to the writing of hymns. Finally, later in the nineteenth century, emerged the gospel hymn, given opportunity and impetus by the campaigns in Britain of Dwight L. Moody

460

Elizabeth Singer (1674–1737) married Thomas Rowe; Elizabeth Tollett lived from 1694 to 1754. For both writers, see Hoxie N. Fairchild, Religious Trends in English Poetry, New York, 1939, 1. 134–40.

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and others, and fostered by evangelical responses to the needs of the age. Important preachers, such as Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the minister of Spurgeon's Tabernacle in London, provided hymn-books for their own congregations; while elsewhere an endless stream of Revivalist books—Sacred Songs and Solos, Alexander's Hymns, and popular books of every kind poured from the religious presses. One of the most important, if slightly separate, traditions is that of American hymnody. It flourished, particularly on the eastern seaboard, and especially among Unitarians, during the nineteenth century. In turn it then fed the English tradition, beginning with the two American hymns to find a place in Hymns Ancient and Modern of 1861, George Washington Doane's ‘Thou art the way’, and Charles William Everest's ‘Take up thy cross, the Saviour said’, and continuing with the work of Samuel Long-fellow, Samuel Johnson, John Greenleaf Whittier, and others.

Hymnological Darwinism A pivotal moment in the history of nineteenth-century hymnody was the publication of Hymns Ancient and Modern in 1861. Its astonishing popularity made it, in Professor Temperley's words, ‘indisputably the representative book of Victorian hymnody’.461 Temperley has described its progress as follows: The success of Hymns ancient and modern was startling. The proportion of London churches using it had reached one in four as early as 1867, when it had already overtaken its nearest rival, the S.P.C.K. Psalms and hymns . . . The inevitable decline of books such as Mercer's [Church Psalter and Hymn Book (1854)] that had been popular before, and the total eclipse of the remaining tune books and local parish collections, underline the completeness of Ancient and Modern's victory.462 We may set beside this a quotation from a book published only two years before Hymns Ancient and Modern, arguably the most important book of the Victorian era: New species are formed by having some advantage over older forms; and the forms, which are already dominant, or have some advantage over the forms in their own country, give birth to the greatest number of new varieties or incipient species. . . Thus, as it seems to me, the parallel, and, taken in a large sense, simultaneous, succession of the same forms of life throughout the world, accords well with the principle of new species having been formed by dominant species spreading widely and varying; the new species thus produced being themselves dominant, owing to their having had some advantage over their already dominant parents,

461

Nicholas Temperley, The Music of the English Parish Church (Cambridge, 1979), 1. 301.

462

Ibid., 1. 299.

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as well as over other species, and again spreading, varying, and producing new forms.463 Darwin's account of the forms of life changing throughout the natural world in The Origin of Species may well be applied to the process by which Hymns Ancient and Modern acquired such a dominant position after 1861. It may be further applied to the general processes of hymnody (one book on hymns, by F.J. Gillman, is entitled The Evolution of the English Hymn). If we push the analogy further, the early nineteenth century is the time when Sternhold and Hopkins, the ‘Old Version’ of 1562, finally disappeared (apart from the hundredth psalm), like some dinosaur whose time had run out. As Darwin put it, ‘as new forms are produced, unless we admit that specific forms can go on indefinitely increasing in number, many old forms must become extinct’ (p. 79). The Origin of Species is wonderfully relevant to the condition of hymnody in the nineteenth century. Hymn-books, of every style, and catering for every taste (and even every locality, or school), were produced in vast numbers; the numbers of authors and hymns multiplied, over and over again. The result is a huge, inchoate mass of material, what Darwin called ‘an infinite diversity’ of different forms (p. 96); and this leads in turn to what he described as ‘the struggle for existence’ (p. 44). In the nineteenth century, even with the abundance of churches and sects, there were simply too many hymns. There is a limit to the number of hymns that can be printed in a single book, and a limit to the number that can be sung in any year of church services. What therefore follows is a close parallel to the processes of Natural Selection. Hymns, even in a mainstream denominational book, tend to be unevenly used, and some are hardly used at all. They fall out of use through neglect, or indifference, or prejudice. Their rare appearance in a service makes them seem awkward and unfamiliar: as Darwin put it, ‘Rarity, as geology tells us, is the precursor of extinction’ (p. 79). Other hymns arrive, and are included in new editions; and there follows ‘the extinction of the less-favoured forms’: The theory of Natural Selection is grounded on the belief that each new variety, and ultimately each new species, is produced and maintained by having some advantage over those with which it comes into competition; and the consequent extinction of the less-favoured forms almost inevitably follows. (p. 277) The huge number of hymns written during the nineteenth century produces exactly the kind of overcrowding problems that occur in biology when too many individuals or too many species are in competition for living space. The Survival of the Fittest depends on complex adaptations and on a diversity of causes and effects, some of which may be profitably

463

Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (6th edn., London, 1872), p. 281. Page references are included in the text, and are to this edition.

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applied to hymns. Darwin noted, for example, that ‘Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest, does not necessarily include progressive development—it only takes advantage of such variations as arise and are beneficial to each creature under its complex relations of life’ (p. 92). This suggests that one of the secrets of survival against the competition is the presence in a hymn of what might be called ‘beneficial variations’, variations on a frequently chosen theme, or variation in the choice of theme or text itself. A hymn that puts forward the same message in the same language as a hundred others is unlikely to survive. The corollary of this is that hymns which are similar to one another in subject-matter and treatment have more difficulty in finding room to survive. As Darwin observed, ‘each new variety or species, during the progress of its formation, will generally press hardest on its nearest kindred, and tend to exterminate them’ (p. 80). The more hymns there are on the greatness of God in creation, and the more the same phrases or ideas are repeated, the less likelihood there is of each one surviving in common use; the more they resemble one another, the more chance there is of one being chosen and the other not. They resemble those plants in which, as Darwin noted, ‘close interbreeding diminishes vigour and fertility’ (p. 71). A particularly obvious example might be those gospel hymns which speak, over and over again, of heaven as home, and of the bright and shining land on the other shore: A few more marchings weary, Then we'll gather home! A few more storm-clouds dreary, Then we'll gather home! (W. H. Doane) This could have come from any one of hundreds of gospel hymns of the later Victorian period. Similarly, we may find, in another kind of hymn-book, a verse such as this: Help us ever steadfast In the faith to be: In Thy Church's conflicts Fighting valiantly. Loving Saviour, strengthen These weak hearts of ours, Through Thy cross to conquer Crafty evil powers. Jesus, King of glory, Throned above the sky, Jesus, tender Saviour, Hear Thy children cry. (W. H. Davison)

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Every line of this verse contains a statement which is unexceptionable but which might have been found anywhere: the same phrases recur with a dreary predictability. If close interbreeding diminishes vigour and fertility, other organisms survive by modifying their structures. Discussing insects, Darwin observed that modifications in the adult may affect the structure of the larva; but in all cases natural selection will ensure that they shall not be injurious: for if they were so, the species would become extinct. (p. 62) Thus hymns by Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley have survived by modifying their original word structures (against the wishes of John Wesley). It is no longer possible to sing, as Watts wrote: Thy works with sov'reign glory shine, And speak the majesty divine; Let Britain round her shores proclaim The sound and honour of thy name. (‘My God, my King, thy various praise’) and Charles Wesley's references to bowels have had to be modified: Jesus, thy wandering sheep behold: See, Lord, with yearning bowels see464 At other times, of course, alterations have been unfortunate, hymn-book committees not being so sensible as nature.465 Darwin's observation that injurious modifications would lead to extinction is likely to be proved correct in many modern books. Hymns survive in the right climate—social, ideological, liturgical. Darwin devotes an important paragraph in the chapter on Natural Selection to climatic change: We shall best understand the probable course of natural selection by taking the case of a country undergoing some slight physical change, for instance, of climate. The proportional numbers of its inhabitants will almost immediately undergo a change, and some species will probably become extinct. We may conclude, from what we have seen of the intimate and complex manner in which the inhabitants of each country are bound together, that any change in the numerical proportions of the inhabitants, independently of the change of climate itself, would seriously affect the

464

From Hymns and Sacred Poems, 1742, now altered to; ‘jesus, thy wandering sheep behold! | See, Lord, with tenderest pity see’, (in Hymns and Psalms, 1983, no 772). Donald Davie has written fascinatingly about this ‘physicality’ of Charles Wesley's hymns. See ‘The Carnality of Charles Wesley’, PN Review, 18, no. 1.

465

See, for example, the text of no 487 in Hymns and Psalms, 1983, compared with John Wesley's adaptation of Watts's hymn used in all Methodist books up to and including The Methodist Hymn Book, 1933.

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others. If the country were open on its borders, new forms would certainly immigrate, and this would likewise seriously disturb the relations of some of the former inhabitants. (p. 59) We may easily apply this to the climatic conditions in which hymns have been written since the beginning of the nineteenth century, and perhaps earlier (the Methodist Revival created the conditions for Charles Wesley's hymns). The Tractarian movement, the visits of gospel campaigners, the rise of the great preachers, temperance movements, Sunday schools, public schools, all created Victorian microclimates for the writing of hymns; and in spite of confusions and controversies, and an awareness of major difficulties—social problems, science and its effect on belief, biblical hermeneutics—the general Church climate remained astonishingly favourable to the writing of hymns, as it did not in the twentieth century. As Owen Chadwick has boldly written, ‘Victorian England was religious’.466 It was also a time of controversy and debate: Chadwick's study of the Victorian Church is filled with the problems of Church government, of schisms and departures, of disestablishments and dissents. Occasionally hymn-writers faced up to this: See round thine ark the hungry billows curling; See how thy foes their banners are unfurling; Lord, while their darts envenomed they are hurling, Thou canst preserve us. The hymn was written by Philip Pusey, elder brother of Oxford's E. B. Pusey, during the 1830s and the controversy over Church rates. Later, in 1866, Samuel Stone wrote ‘The church's one foundation’ during the argument over the writings of Bishop Colenso of Natal. Stone tried to perceive the Church as it might be seen from the outside: Though with a scornful wonder Men see her sore opprest, By schisms rent asunder, By heresies distrest,— The ‘Though’ of the first line is the prelude, of course, to a brighter vision of the future: Yet Saints their watch are keeping, Their cry goes up, ‘How long?’ And soon the night of weeping Shall be the morn of song. The hope is still buoyant in these hymns. But (as Chadwick acknowledged) the Victorian age ended with the war of 1914. The loss of confidence in national religion, which came with the First World War, meant that English

466

Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church (3 edn., London, 1971), p. 1.

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hymnody went quiet for fifty years: the most significant event was the publication of Songs of Praise (1925), which attempted to invigorate hymnody by cross-breeding it—as Darwin would have noted—with English lyric poetry. By about 1960, encouraged by modern translations of the Bible and new liturgical experiments, hymn-writers plucked up courage to try again, and have continued to respond to the rapidly changing environment in which the Church is found—an environment dominated by technologies such as television, rapid communication, and travel, and tormented by problems of world poverty, racial conflict, and the problems of a multicultural and multifaith urban society. Climate, in the Darwinian sense, has much to do with the writing of hymns, but of course it is not the whole story. One of Darwin's greatest characteristics is his refusal to oversimplify, and he acknowledges ‘how complex and unexpected are the checks and relations between organic beings’ (p. 51). Accidents of planting and variations of management can make a vast difference to the life-expectation of a plant. The same thing may be said of hymns, some of which become particularly loved, and therefore cared for by one denomination (printed in all the books, used often in services). Probably the best example is the way in which some hymns of Charles Wesley are beloved by Methodists, and paraphrases by members of the Church of Scotland; but there are others which become strongly associated with one place or with one style of worship. Another accidental effect is found, obviously, in the identification of certain words with a particular tune; as a plant flourishes if it is protected, so a hymn can survive if it has a tune that suits it, or that ‘carries’ it. In the overcrowded world of hymnody, tunes become more and more significant as determining factors. In addition to these environmental effects, there is the personal one: writers are inspired by other writers. Heber and Keble had an influence far beyond their actual contribution to hymnody; women's hymn-writing owes much to Anne Steele, and children's hymnody to Cecil Frances Alexander. More recently, Timothy Dudley-Smith, by writing ‘Tell out, my soul, the greatness of the Lord’, showed that a new hymn could be written that would be an acceptable addition to every hymn-book, and in so doing he helped to create a microclimate for modern hymn-writing. In the study of Victorian and twentieth-century hymnody, therefore, the critical process will have to take into account the many different elements which have joined to create the great stream of hymnody, and of those writers who have made the most distinctive contributions to it; bearing in mind that those hymns which are discussed are a very small part of an immense body of work, of hymns that were printed once and never again, or which flourished briefly and then disappeared, or which were beloved by a sect which no longer exists. It is useful to be reminded of the sheer volume of work, before going on to discuss that part of it which has a genuine

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significance in the development of the English hymn. I begin with a hymn-writer of the 1830s, Henry Francis Lyte.

Henry Francis Lyte Lyte's father was an army officer who moved to Ireland and then separated from his wife. She went to live in London, probably in 1801 or 1802, when Henry Francis was 8 or 9, and was never seen by him again. His father was posted to Jersey in December 1803, and lived there for the next fourteen years, until 1818; he saw his son occasionally, and apparently began to represent himself as an uncle rather than a father, with his second wife as an aunt.467 These unusual circumstances justify a reference to biography: for Lyte's work can be seen to have features that a psychoanalyst might attribute to the early loss of his mother and the remarriage and distancing of his father—for example in the choice of imagery: Father-like, he tends and spares us; Well our feeble frame he knows; In his hands he gently bears us, Rescues us from all our foes— or Abide with me, fast falls the eventide; The darkness deepens, Lord with me abide— The first of these extracts contains the description of the ideal father, the one that Lyte never had; the second is the cry of a child in the gathering darkness—‘stay with me’. If we need further evidence, we may find it in one of Lyte's poems, entitled ‘On Dreaming of my Mother’, which begins Stay, gentle shadow of my mother, stay:— In addition, there are many poems by Lyte which re-enact the process of separation from the beloved, either by death or parting. Of the poems about death, one is known only by its first line—‘She is gone! she is gone!’; two others, ‘Agnes’ and ‘Ellen’, are concerned with the deaths of young girls; ‘Mary's Grave’ is about the death of another girl or woman; and ‘The Mother and her Dying Boy’ is a dialogue, which represents the agony of a child's death, mitigated by the hopes of heaven. Of the poems about separation, ‘Parted Christians' describes how When reft of the converse of those that they love, The godless may fret and repine: ’Tis ours to look up to a Father above, And try to His will to resign—

467

See B. G. Skinner, Henry Francis Lyte, Brixham's Poet and Priest (Exeter, 1974), 5–10.

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Sweet hope realizes the things that shall be, And memory those that have been; And, reaching by these to what sense cannot see, We lose the dark present between. Like many Victorians, Lyte had to live in what he saw as the dark present, Matthew Arnold's ‘darkling plain’— Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night. (‘Dover Beach’) Lyte was obsessed by darkness, separation, and loss: he naturally sought compensation in certain stabilities, which he tried to hold on to. One poem, significantly entitled ‘Stability’, shows the contrast clearly: There is a change in all below; Nought sure beneath the sky: Suns rise and set, tides ebb and flow And man but lives to die. Lyte then reflects And let them pass—each earthly thing— While, Lord, 'tis mine to stand On Thy eternal word, and cling To Thy almighty hand. In the midst of change and insecurity, the clinging to the hand is, like the cry of the child in the darkness, a sign of need and dependence—‘stay with me; hold my hand’.468 He saw transience and degeneration all around him—‘change and decay in all around I see’—and he loved stability, whether it was the security of home (the security which he never experienced himself as a child) or the security of the Church of England, or the ultimate and permanent safety of heaven. The Collect for the Fourth Sunday after Easter might have been written for him, with its recommendation ‘that so, among the sundry and manifold changes of this world, our hearts may surely there be fixed, where true joys are to be found’. As confirmation of this, there is Lyte's paraphrase of Psalm 84: Pleasant are Thy courts above, In the land of light and love;

468

Lyte's desire for stability and reassurance in an ever-changing world is probably also responsible for his conservatism on ecclesiastical and political questions. He opposed Catholic Emancipation in 1828, and spoke at a dinner in 1830 against the Reform Bill: he agreed that the British constitution was not perfect, but wished, he said, ‘to protest against any innovations on its integrity by unskilful hands—by those who came to it like blind Samsons, ready to pull the fabric about our ears, and crush all in one common ruin’ (Skinner, Henry Francis Lyte, 66).

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Pleasant are thy courts below, In this land of sin and woe: What is found here, as often in Lyte's hymns, is a use of words in patterns. He has a striking ability to produce a phrase, and then repeat it, or vary it, or turn it back on itself. Here we have an emphatic inversion—‘Thy courts above are pleasant’ would not have been half as effective—and the repeated ‘in this land of ’. In other places, the same thing happens, most obviously with phrases such as ‘Praise Him! Praise Him!’, which form a kind of refrain but which are then varied—‘Praise with us the God of grace!’; or ‘Abide with me’, which becomes, a line later, ‘with me abide’, and then returns with a different force in every verse. ‘Pleasant are Thy courts above’ comes, like most of Lyte's hymns which are still in use, from The Spirit of the Psalms, published in 1834 with an enlarged edition in 1836. Lyte was peculiarly fitted, by the circumstances of his childhood, to respond to the psalms and versify them; in addition they would have been familiar to him from saying the Daily Office. They speak of the created world, and of goodness, and of human wickedness and failure; but especially they speak of the greatness and majesty, the goodness and firmness of God, contrasting it with the littleness of man and the transience of earthly things. When he began the book he was already an experienced poet,469 and he almost certainly knew some of the earlier attempts to produce metrical versions. His own vary in quality: some of them, as he acknowledged, have ‘a poverty, a flatness . . . which are not to be found in the Divine originals’.470 The best of them, however, show a very sophisticated art, a mode which involves intricate rhetoric and the delicate use of contrast. The best example, and the best known, is ‘Praise, my soul, the King of Heaven’, which involves Lyte's characteristic patterning and rhetoric, with suspension and inversion: it uses, as the metrical psalms do, words in an unexpected order, but it does so in such a way as to make that departure from the normal speech order a source of strength rather than weakness. It is a fine hymn, strong in individual lines, in verses, and in the structure of the whole. It also has two powerful tunes, Goss's PRAISE, MY SOUL (called by its Latin name, LAUDA ANIMA, in some American books) and Smart's REGENT SQUARE. Most noticeably, words and music confidently impose their own rhetoric upon the singer:

469

At Trinity College, Dublin, Lyte won the prize for an English poem three years running. He had a wide knowledge of English poetry, and later in his life he edited the poems of Henry Vaughan. In his library he had Spenser, Shakespeare, Southwell, Quarles, Vaughan, Milton. His interest in seventeenth-century spirituality meant that he had Donne's sermons, and (more surprisingly, perhaps) several volumes by Benjamin Keach. See The Catalogue of the Valuable, Rare and Curious Library of the Rev H. F. Lyte, Deceased, with the subsequent additions made by his son, the late F. W. M. Lyte, Esq. (London, 1849). The library took seventeen evenings to sell.

470

See ‘The Spirit of the Psalms’ (Preface) in The Poetical Works of the Rev H. F. Lyte, ed. John Appleyard (London, 1907), 186–7

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Praise, my soul, the King of Heaven, To His feet Thy tribute bring! Ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven, Who like me His praise should sing? Praise Him! praise Him! Praise the everlasting King! The pattern is one in which straightforward first and third lines are succeeded by more complex second and fourth ones. The word-order of line 1 has a suspension, but is fairly simple; whereas line 2 is inverted—it should be ‘Bring thy tribute to his feet’. Line 3 is straight enough, whereas line 4 should be ‘Who should sing his praise like me?’ The normal order of an English sentence—subject, verb, object—is usually necessary because English does not have declensions: here the mind has to disentangle the lines and put the words back in their right place, while still singing them in the wrong place. In line 2 we have adverbial clause/object/verb, and in line 4 we have subject/adverbial clause/object/verb. The inversion, and the need of the mind to find a meaning, sets up a tension, a very agreeable tension because it is easily resolved and it adds interest. The first and third lines are straightforward, so there is a plainness which makes an attractive contrast. It is as simple and as pleasing as a knitting pattern—knit one, purl one; and then, further down the cable-stitch of Lyte's verbal pullover, comes the simple border to round it off. The second verse is different, although again we notice the patterning. Here it takes the form of having everything in twos, ‘grace and favour’, ‘slow . . . swift’, ‘chide . . . bless’, enclosed in the repetition of ‘Praise Him for’ and ‘Praise Him still’. Verse 3 is different again, because here the straightforward lines are 1 and 4, with the inverted lines between them. Line 2 should be ‘He knows our feeble frame well’ and line 3 ‘He bears us gently in his hands’; and verse 4 changes again, with the first two lines inverted and the second two straight: Frail as summer's flower we flourish: Blows the wind, and it is gone. But while mortals rise and perish, God endures unchanging on— The last of these lines is weak, but the mind then turns to the reassuring ‘Praise Him! praise Him! and then into the last verse, where the contemplation of earthly things—the frailty of humanity, the goodness of God—changes to a mystical contemplation of the joys of heaven and earth, united in a chorus of universal praise. It is a fitting end to a hymn which is not only very effectively constructed in its lines and verses, but which also has a strong overall organization: first the command to praise; then the reasons why—grace and favour to our fathers, care for us, God's unchanging love;

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and then the return to praise, this time joining heaven and earth in adoration. The same movement is shown in Lyte's version of the Deus Misereatur, Psalm 67: God of mercy, God of grace, Show the brightness of Thy face: Shine upon us, Saviour, shine, Fill Thy church with light Divine; And thy saving health extend, Unto earth's remotest end. The couplets here are precise and regular, marching along to a regular beat: that beat carries even the weak parts of the verse, such as the last couplet (where ‘remotest’ is three syllables to fill up the line). In the third verse, we see Lyte's love of patterning again: God to man His blessing give, Man to God devoted live; All below, and all above, One in joy, and light, and love. God/man, Man/God, All . . . all, below/above: the binary oppositions of significant words bolt the verse together like scaffolding, ending with the same vision as ‘Praise, my soul’ of heaven and earth as united in joy and love. Because the verse is in seven-syllable couplets, the rhymes become very important—grace/face, shine/Divine, sing/ King, and finally the climactic above/love. They are part of Lyte's hymnic art, which joyfully exploits patterns, rhymes, rhetorical flourishes, to make strong lines and verses leading, usually, to a powerful conclusion. All these features of his art are found in ‘Abide with me’, and part of the secret of that hymn is in its art; but there is also something else, more mysterious and more moving, which has its source in deep structures of feeling and experience, comparable to those which are found in the psalms.471 Like ‘God of mercy, God of grace’, it is a hymn in couplets. But instead of the neat and decorous tripping metre of 77.77.77, there are now three syllables more in each line, making a very different reading and singing experience. The lines are much more drawn out, stretching from rhyme to rhyme across complex areas of thought and feeling, so that the hymn is

471

There seems no reason to doubt the long tradition that Lyte gave a copy to a relative after preaching his last sermon at Brixham on 5 September 1847, before travelling to the south of France in search of health (he died there in the winter of 1848). But there are several copies in Lyte's hand, and he may well have written the hymn earlier. He certainly altered phrases. The last copy, sent back from France, contains ‘The darkness deepens’ instead of the previous ‘The darkness thickens’, and ‘Shine through the gloom’ instead of ‘Speak’ in the last verse.

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much more than the sum of its meaning: it is an experience felt through the singing of the lines and the verses, felt too through the tune (the tune by W. H. Monk, now inseparable from this hymn, rather than Lyte's own tune). Tune and lines together ensure an emphasis on the strong caesura, which most often comes after the fourth syllable. The lines often have a comma, and EVENTIDE descends in lines 1 and 3 to an E flat, holds it for two beats, and then leaps a fifth to the B flat. So the mind apprehends a heavy four syllables, 12–3–4, and then a pause, followed by six others (this pattern is not invariable, of course). So the experience of ‘Abide with me’ is, at least partly, a rhythmical and musical one, tune and words working together to allow the reader or singer to ‘feel’ the lines; and through that feeling comes the understanding. It is one of those hymns in which we can, as it were, ‘feel’ the thought: we do so through a sense that the first part of each line, the 1–2–3–4, is amplified and sustained, and sometimes justified and explained, by the following six syllables. The result is a hymn that moves slowly, line by line, and verse by verse, each verse coming to rest on the central phrase. As the manuscript tells us, Lyte had in his mind Luke 24: 29, ‘Abide with us, for it is toward Evening, and the day is far spent’. It is one of the most moving, comforting, and human stories of the Gospel, signifying the return of Jesus, the divine in the ordinary human situation, breaking bread with the two disciples at Emmaus so that they suddenly recognized him. Lyte gives the story a personal urgency by changing ‘us’ into ‘me’; although the words ‘Abide with’ and the full text (which was printed in Hymns Ancient and Modern above the hymn) are reminders of the original circumstances: the dispirited disciples, yet kind and hospitable, the late evening, the risen Christ, unrecognized yet wonderfully present.472 But the reading has to be metaphorical as well as literal. ‘It is toward evening, and the day is far spent’ refers to the actual time, but is also a metaphor for life itself, for the end of the day of life, for the night which comes when no man can work, for the eventide, the time and tide that wait for no one. It is a reminder of the coming of darkness, of human loneliness and helplessness. In this situation, human beings become dependent on God, as a child looks to its mother or father when faced with the coming dark. I have already suggested that Lyte was psychologically preconditioned to this kind of dependence by his unstable childhood; but we might also notice Tennyson's verses in In Memoriam, written at about the same time as ‘Abide with me’ and published a few years later, in 1850:

472

The usual printing, from Hymns Ancient and Modern onwards, is of five of the eight verses, which is probably sensible. They conduct the reader/singer decorously through a series of connected reflections on life and death.

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Behold, we know not anything; I can but trust that good shall fall At last—far off—at last, to all, And every winter change to spring. So runs my dream: but what am I? An infant crying in the night: An infant crying for the light: And with no language but a cry. (In Memoriam, LIV) Both writers see themselves as surrounded by darkness, and as children crying for help: it may be the darkness of the mind, or the darkness of coming death, or of bereavement, as it was for Tennyson, and as it was for Lyte, who portrays the darkness of a life where helpers have failed and comforts fled. So the first two lines set up a whole series of meanings, indeterminate and polysemic: Abide with me; fast falls the eventide, The darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide; The eventide is the evening, but it also represents more than the time of day; the darkness is the coming night, but it is more than this. The first lines signal to the reader that this is more than an evening hymn: it is a meditation on life, on its transience and its anxieties. But we notice, too, how controlled the discourse is: this is a call to God, but it is a serious call, beautifully paced and with a most elegant chiasmus—‘Abide with me; fast falls . . . darkness deepens . . . with me abide’. Lyte's genius for rhetorical patterns is evident again. The metaphor is made explicit at the beginning of verse 2: Swift to its close ebbs out life's little day; Earth's joys grow dim, its glories pass away; Here ‘eventide’ is not just the evening time but the evening tide, ebbing out at the end of life's little day. It is an appropriate image for one who knew the sea as Lyte did, who lived by it and who was beloved by the fishermen who sailed on it. The sea becomes a potent reminder of the great rhythms of life, of the endless cycle of change, of growth and decay, as a tide comes in, reaches the full, and then ebbs. And as, in the psalms, our lives are like the grass that springs up in the morning, and in the evening is cut down and withers, so our lives, too, are, in the light of eternity, as short as a day's tide; for in God's sight a thousand years are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night. And death, to those who live by the sea, is a going out of the tide. Dickens used this idea in David Copperfield, when the dying Barkis, on the Norfolk coast, is lying at the point of death, and Daniel Peggotty says:

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‘People can't die, along the coast . . . except when the tide's pretty nigh out. They can't be born, unless it's pretty nigh in—not properly born, till flood. He's a-going out with the tide. It's ebb at half-arter three, slack water half-anhour. If he lives till it turns, he'll hold his own till past the flood, and go out with the next tide.’ And at the end of that chapter (XXX), Barkis dies—‘it being low water, he went out with the tide’. So, in Lyte's hymn, the day closes; the tide goes out; earth's joys grow dim, its glories pass away. So all things change and decay, except the one who never changes: the phrase is from Henry Vaughan, whose poems Lyte edited, and whose influence may be felt everywhere in the juxtaposition of life with death in this hymn. Because life is short—a little day—and it is going, fast, it is all the more important to have a guide and stay. The poet needs the presence of God not just at the moment of death but ‘every passing hour’, hours of happiness and hours of misery, ‘through cloud and sunshine’. Again the instability of life, as fickle as the weather, is contrasted with the reality of the presence of God—‘thou who changest not’, Vaughan's ‘one who never changes’. And with this, the writer fears no foe: ills have no weight, tears no bitterness; the grave has no victory. This wonderful vision is conditional: ‘I triumph still, if Thou abide with me’. And it is that conditionality which prevents the fourth verse from being triumphalist. I fear no foe, if I have you at hand to bless me. It focuses our attention on the ever-present human need, in the sundry and manifold changes of this life, to trust in the providence of God and the teaching of the Church. Lyte throws his challenge down in the face of the earlier verses, with their human fears—the coming of death, the loss of friends, the failure of comforts, the deepening of the darkness. In this sense, the five verses that we usually sing represent a gradual alleviation of the darkness, the insecurity of the first two giving way to the guidance of verse 3 and the security and hope of verse 4. And yet, that security is conditional. The hymn contains within itself an awareness not only of the passing of time and the shortness of life, but also of two almost contrary movements: of a blessed assurance, which repeats the cry ‘Where is death's sting? Where, grave, thy victory?’; and of a deep dependence, as of a child on its mother—stay with me in the gloom, the gathering darkness, as my eyes close at the end of my short day of life and the tide goes out. The first is triumphant, the second shows a deep vulnerability and need: Lyte joins the two together throughout the hymn, with a culminating summary in the final two lines: Heaven's morning breaks, and earth's vain shadows flee; In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me! Lyte's hymn is both early Victorian and startlingly modern. In the last two lines of ‘Abide with me’ we have the same kind of contrary movement

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which is found (for example) at the centre of Waiting for Godot, and those two lines sum up so much of what has gone before in the hymn and which is found in Beckett's play too: an awareness of the shortness of life, for example. In the play one of the characters, Pozzo, says ‘They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.’ And in the light of this—‘in life, in death’—how are we to respond? We could despair, and see it all as pointless; we could presume, and say that everything will be fine in the end, that there is a purpose, that we shall, like Christian, reach the gates of the Celestial City; or we could, like Beckett's tramps, live somewhere in between, conscious of darkness, and failure, and change and decay, but also having some hope, and having each other to talk to and survive with. In Beckett's play that purpose is in waiting, and in the shared experience of change and decay; in Lyte's hymn it issues in the hope—‘Heaven's morning breaks, and earth's vain shadows flee’—which is balanced so movingly, perhaps even desperately, by the deepening darkness and the cry of a child—‘In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me!’ It was not for nothing, I think, that Lyte spent years on The Spirit of the Psalms: the psalms taught him the fundamental truths about human nature. It was not for nothing, either, that he spent years of his life ministering to fisherfolk beside the sea as perpetual curate of Brixham. It was not for nothing that he strove all his life to find rest, the stability in God that he had never had as a child. All these things go into the making of ‘Abide with me’. And because of this, that hymn expresses deep and mysterious truths about human nature, neither presuming nor despairing, but placing the hope of heaven against the shortness of life and the helplessness of human kind. One response to the persistent existential questions, to the perpetual fears and hopes, may find its most permanent and proper expression in a whisper that is half hope and half dread: ‘In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me!’

14 The Oxford Movement, and the Revival of Ancient Hymnody The Church, 'tis thought, is wakening through the land

(Isaac Williams, The Baptistery)

This is not the place to attempt a history of the Oxford Movement, except to notice the part which it played in the development of English hymnody. Throughout the 1830s, it fought against liberal and Broad Church Christianity, challenging the idea of an Established Church that was subject to political control, and striving for a purer concept of worship and Church government (which Newman, after 1845, found in Roman Catholicism). The perpetual refrain of Lyra Apostolica, the book of poems which Newman and his friends published in 1836,473 was that of the decline of the nineteenth-century Church: the contributors were obsessed by ‘Dissent’, ‘Idolatry and Dissent’, and by ‘Religious States’ such as ‘Heathenism’, ‘Judaism’, ‘Superstition’, ‘Schism’, and ‘Liberalism’ (all of these are the titles of poems). Against this was set the purity of the Early Church: Christ's Church was holiest in her youthful days, Ere the world on her smiled; (CXXIX) In those days, it was argued, the Church opposed the government rather than being subservient to it (in the matter of appointments to Bishoprics and Professorships), and (according to Newman, who was also editing them) the Greek Fathers were the champions of a cleansing religion:

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The poems had been published from time to time, after 1833, in the British Magazine, by Newman, Isaac Williams, Hurrell Froude, and J. W. Bowden, together with Keble. As G. B. Tennyson has observed (Victorian Devotional Poetry (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1981), 114 ff.), it was the work of poet-priests who saw themselves as charged with a mission; its epigraph, chosen by Newman, who had been abroad, was the combative speech from Homer's Iliad : ‘You shall know the difference now that I am back again.’ The poets were given Greek letters after their poems (Keble was gamma, Newman delta) in a way that connected with the doctrine of Reserve, later made explicit by Isaac Williams in his Tract of 1838, ‘On Reserve in Communicating Religious Knowledge’. The Greek letters were, as G. B. Tennyson has acutely perceived, ‘Reserve with a Newman touch, restraint that points ever so subtly to the intensity lying behind it’ (p. 120).

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THE REVIVAL OF ANCIENT HYMNODY

All thine is Clement's varied page; And Dionysius, ruler sage, In days of doubt and pain; And Origen with eagle eye; And saintly Basil's purpose high To smite imperial heresy, And cleanse the Altar's stain. (LXXXIX) To Keble, something of this function remained in Oxford, in its beauty and spiritual influence (which is why he and others were so upset at the appointment of Hampden as Regius Professor of Divinity in 1836, and as Bishop of Hereford in 1848). His poem on Oxford warns as well as celebrates: Lo! on the top of each aerial spire What seems a star by day, so high and bright, It quivers from afar in golden light: But 'tis a form of earth, though touched with fire Celestial, raised in other days to tell How, when they tired of prayer, Apostles fell. Oxford at prayer, independent of prime ministers and of all the corruptions of the Victorian age, was Keble's ideal. It had affinities with the celebration of holiness found in Isaac Williams's The Cathedral, or the Catholic and Apostolic Church in England (1838), containing poems which correspond to the various elements of a cathedral building—exterior, cloisters, nave, aisles, and finally THE CHOIR (in capitals). ‘The Choir’ is preceded by ‘The Steps to the Choir (the Litany)’, two hymns on ‘The Approach to the Choir’, and ‘The Screen (Disciplina Arcani)’. The choir itself becomes the holy of holies. It is all in marked contrast to ‘The Modern Cathedral’, where Williams described a ‘silver-tongued spruce verger’ showing the tourists round: ‘Sad picture of lost Faith and evil nigh!’ It was in accord with this kind of belief that Keble turned to translating a hymn of the first or second century, preserved by St Basil: Hail! gladdening Light, of His pure glory poured Who is th'immortal Father, heavenly, blest, Holiest of Holies—Jesus Christ our Lord! Now we are come to the Sun's hour of rest, The lights of evening round us shine, We hymn the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit divine! With its evocation of the ‘Holiest of Holies’ this has some claim to be the surviving hymn that best characterizes the Oxford Movement, although it is not the best known of the poems in Lyra Apostolica. That place is reserved for the strangest of nineteenth-century hymns, Newman's ‘Lead, kindly light’. It is strange because it is so imprecise: as Owen Chadwick has noted,


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all sorts of alterations were made to it during the nineteenth century to make it more explicitly orthodox.474 It was called ‘Faith’ in Lyra Apostolica (later ‘The Pillar of the Cloud’) and preceded by the words ‘Unto the godly there ariseth up light in the darkness’. In later years, Newman was unable or unwilling to say what it meant: quoting Keble, he said that ‘poets were not bound to be critics, or to give a sense to what they had written’.475 But the poem gives a general impression that is almost enough to account for its appeal, the impression of a light that guides the traveller through the growing darkness. Almost, but not quite: for the sentiment of ‘through the night of doubt and sorrow’ is common enough. Newman's hymn has something of the magic of his prose, a peculiarly attractive combination of rhythm and image; the longer lines nearly all have a strong caesura after the fourth syllable, which is echoed in the four-syllabled short lines, and in the poem's final phrase, ‘and lost awhile’. These fours alternate with six-syllabled phrases—‘and I am far from home’. . .‘I was not ever thus’—making an even-numbered syllabic music, 4 . . . 6 . . . 4 . . . 4 . . . 6 . . . 4 . Recording these word patterns sounds a mechanical way to approach the poem, but its effect depends to some degree on the subtle movements of rhythm, on pauses and swift glidings (much as Newman's often-enchanting prose does). By these means, the simple imagery of the first verse conveys hesitations, movements forward, tentative hopes, the sense of being exiled; of the human condition, far from home, in the dark night taking life one step at a time (‘one step enough for me’). In these circumstances, the appeal is to the light, ‘kindly light’, merciful and helpful to the benighted traveller. In verse 2 the poet remembers, however, that he was not always so trusting and grateful: I was not ever thus, nor pray'd that Thou Shouldst lead me on. I loved to choose and see my path, but now Lead Thou me on! The verse complements verse 1: from the confession of being lost in the gloom, the poet remembers a time when he thought he knew where he was going. In contrast to the encircling gloom, he remembers that he loved the ‘garish day’. The bright-coloured adjective suggests that he now looks back on that time with distaste, as though he has outgrown such facile pleasure and his sensibility is now deeper. Verses 1 and 2 record the way in which tragedy, illness (Newman had recently recovered from a near-fatal illness in Sicily), anxiety—all these things look back at comedy and confidence. This uncertainty is found, too, in the words ‘At Sea’, which are found with the date (‘June 16, 1833’) in some versions. The poet was writing at

474

Owen Chadwick, The Spirit of the Oxford Movement (Cambridge, 1990), ch. 4.

475

‘Preface’, The Poems of John Henry Newman, ed. Frederic Chapman (London, 1924), p. vii.

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sea—near Sardinia—and ‘all at sea’, in a state of uncertainty and mental confusion; the date was a significant record of when this happened. It was the same kind of record of time and place that had been found in Wordsworth's ‘Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey’, and which was common in Romantic-period poetry, a ‘spot of time’ (and place) which was significant as a moment of spiritual experience. But through all the directionless wandering, the poet celebrates ‘Thy power’, which in the past has blessed him (tolerating the brash over-confidence of his earlier years) and which will continue to lead him onwards. The landscape is bleak and rugged: O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent, till The night is gone; The moor and the fen are wide tracts of country that have to be crossed, stretching out before the traveller; the crag and the torrent are dangerous, and have to be climbed or got through somehow. Only then comes the sense of release, as the morning breaks and the shadows fly: And with the morn those angel faces smile Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile. The ‘angel faces’ have been argued over, many times; perhaps the most convincing explanation is that of Newman's friend, Charles Marriott, who (in the words of Owen Chadwick, who thinks Marriott ‘correct’) ‘suggested that the couplet touched on the idea that infants have a more intimate communion with the unseen world’.476 This has affinities with Vaughan's ‘The Retreate’, with its reference to ‘angel-infancy’, and to Wordsworth's ‘Immortality Ode’: in Newman's appropriation they suggest the memory of a time, before the garish day (‘long since’) when he seemed to be able to communicate with angels. In the context of the poem, the recovery of such an innocence is a wonderful return to the time of origins. The poem thus holds out the possibility of a return to a state of primal innocence, while acknowledging the present darkness and recognizing the hubris of a confident and self-sufficient spirituality. Newman uses the English word for hubris (‘Pride ruled my will’) and asks for it to be forgotten, in verse 2. It is effective because, like Lyte's ‘Abide with me’, it combines realism and hope; and it has become a comforting hymn for many because the last lines suggest some kind of reuniting with loved ones (especially children) who have died. If this is a misreading (and who knows?) it is part of the rough handling which this exquisitely sensitive poem has received, which is recorded in Owen Chadwick's essay and in Julian's Dictionary of Hymnology, to which Chadwick is in part indebted.477 It

476

Chadwick, The Spirit of the Oxford Movement, 95.

477

Ibid., ch. 4; John Julian, A Dictionary of Hymnology (London, 1892), 667–9.


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was first used in a hymn-book by Horatius Bonar, who included it in the Bible Hymn Book of 1845 (beginning ‘Lead, Saviour, lead’), and was subsequently printed by E. H. Bickersteth in The Hymnal Companion to the Book of Common Prayer with an additional verse written by Bickersteth himself. As Julian and Chadwick have noticed, other versions appeared, both in this country and in America; and there was much speculation about its meaning, especially in a correspondence in Notes and Queries during 1880. As a poem of the Oxford Movement, it is unexpected in its recording of subjective impressions, although not unusual in its record of perplexity and darkness: indeed, one reading of the poem could be that of the sensitive soul confronting the nineteenth century. The later poems of Newman that have been used as hymns, both from The Dream of Gerontius (1865), are very different in mood and in technique, perhaps reflecting a firmer assurance of the Roman Catholic Church as a safeguard against the perplexing transiences of the age. One of them begins with the word ‘Firmly’, and is a statement of belief in a particular manner. Gerontius ‘acknowledges’ the Incarnation, as if this was something that compelled him; and his statement in line two is brazenly simple, as mathematics are confounded in the doctrine of the Trinity: Firmly I believe and truly God is Three and God is One; And I next acknowledge duly Manhood taken by the Son. The assertions are astonishingly direct: Gerontius is proclaiming his belief with a private assurance that does not even bother to consider the possibility of doubt. The bold statement of the doctrine of the Trinity is followed by the ‘next’ article of faith, ‘duly’ acknowledged. Similarly, belief in ‘Holy Church’ leads to a total identification of the teachings of the Church with the ideas of Christ: And I hold in veneration, For the love of him alone, Holy Church as his creation, And her teachings as his own. This is an extreme example of a private devotion, disregarding all argument in the plenitude of faith. Similarly, Newman's greatest hymn, ‘Praise to the Holiest in the height’, is a celebration of the great mysteries of the Incarnation and Redemption. The ‘Holiest’, who is to be praised in height and in depth, is ‘most wonderful’ and ‘most sure’ in his works and ways: the poet meditates on the idea that ‘since by man came death; by man came also the resurrection of the dead’, and upon the whole sublime chapter 15 of 1 Corinthians:

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O wisest love! that flesh and blood Which did in Adam fail, Should strive afresh against the foe, Should strive and should prevail; And that a higher gift than grace Should flesh and blood refine, God's presence and his very Self, And Essence all-divine. The first verse is complemented and expanded by the second, to make a graceful expression of the idea of the Godhead on earth, present in human form. Similarly, the next two verses form a unit, in which the second verse explains the difficulties of the first: O generous love! that he who smote In Man for man the foe, The double agony in Man For man should undergo; And in the garden secretly, And on the Cross on high, Should teach his brethren, and inspire To suffer and to die. The ‘double agony’ is explained as the private agony in the garden, and the public torture of the Crucifixion: the semicolon in Newman's poem allows a movement from one verse to another which elucidates the paradox which he loves to celebrate, drawing attention to it by ‘In Man for man . . . in Man/For man’. So the hymn returns to where it began, with a deeper understanding: Praise to the Holiest in the height, And in the depth be praise, In all his words most wonderful, Most sure in all his ways. This fine articulation of a difficult but central doctrine is much later than the Oxford Movement, though written when Newman's example was still attracting converts (such as the undergraduate Gerard Manley Hopkins) into the Roman Catholic Church. It represents a late flowering of the concerns which animated the authors of Lyra Apostolica, but it does so by disregarding the agitation about religious decline that is found throughout that book (and in Isaac Williams's The Cathedral). It is as though Newman was relying on the example of a holy life and a firm doctrine to convert England, rather than on argument and complaint.

After 1845: Faber and Caswall Newman's unquestioning loyalty, after 1845, to the Roman Catholic Church, was based on the inexorable demands of his particular spirituality.


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But an additional attraction must have been what he perceived as the ‘poetical’ nature of the Church. In a review of Keble's Lyra Innocentium, written in 1846, Newman wrote (in the first flush of his convert's enthusiasm) of the Roman Catholic Church as retaining a beauty and poetic order which had (he argued) disappeared from the Church of England: Keble, he insinuated, ought, as a poet, to find his true home by turning to Roman Catholicism. Two hymnwriters who did, F. W. Faber and Edward Caswall, used their talents to further the cause. Faber, in the preface to his Jesus and Mary; or, Catholic Hymns for Singing and Reading (1849), attempted to provide a Roman Catholic equivalent to Olney Hymns— which should contain the mysteries of the faith in easy verse, or different states of the heart and conscience depicted, with the same unadorned simplicity, for example, as the ‘O for a closer walk with God’ of the Olney Hymns;—478 Newman, whose relationship with Faber was not always easy, thought highly of at least one of Faber's hymns. Near the end of his life he asked his Oratorians to sing ‘The Eternal Years’ to him, and he contrasted it with his own celebrated poem: Some people have liked my Lead, kindly light, and it is the voice of one in darkness asking for help from our Lord. But this [Eternal Years] is quite different; this is one with full light rejoicing in suffering with our Lord, so that mine compares unfavourably with it.479 Newman was too generous: ‘The Eternal Years’ has none of the mystery and magic of Newman's poem. It may have attracted him, however, because it urges the reader to see human life in the perspective of eternity (the phrase ‘the Eternal Years’ concludes every verse). Seen in this way, the perpetual worries about sin and forgiveness are made insignificant: Thy self-upbraiding is a snare, Though meekness it appears; More humbling is it far for thee To face the Eternal Years. Brave quiet is the thing for thee, Chiding thy scrupulous fears; Learn to be real, from the thought Of the Eternal Years. The language here is a striking but indecorous mixture of the formal and the colloquial: ‘self-upbraiding’ and ‘scrupulous fears’ contrast with ‘is a

478

F. W. Faber, ‘Preface’ (1849), Jesus and Mary; or, Catholic Hymns for Singing and Reading (London, 1861), p. xvii.

479

Edward Bellasis, Cardinal Newman as a Musician (London, 1892), 38; quoted in Chadwick, p. 97.

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snare’ and ‘quiet is the thing’. That's the thing, says Faber informally: ‘Learn to be real’, to change from the unreality. The Christian Platonism of this idea is expressed so matter-of-factly that it surprises and jolts; it is also difficult to imagine this as a congregational hymn, because it seems to be pulpit instruction, unless the singer can be imagined as engaged in some form of dialogue with himself or herself. Instruction, inextricably involved with such a dialogue, is common in Faber's hymns: Souls of men! why will ye scatter Like a crowd of frightened sheep? Foolish hearts! why will ye wander From a love so true and deep? Who is talking to whom here? is it a preacher, or is it one member of a congregation admonishing others, the ‘crowd’? Certainly when the arguments are brought out, the voice could be either: Was there ever kindest shepherd Half so gentle, half so sweet, As the Saviour who would have us Come and gather round His feet? Faber includes an invitation to reflect that ‘the love of God is broader | Than the measures of man's mind’; as in ‘The Eternal Years’ the anguish of sin is put into perspective: But we make His love too narrow By false limits of our own; And we magnify His strictness With a zeal He will not own. The hymn is an admonition, and at the same time a release, acknowledging the possibility of too much strict selfexamination. In place of the fear of judgement, Faber substituted a trust in the teachings of Christ, with another homely phrase in line 2: If our love were but more simple, We should take Him at His word; And our lives would be all sunshine In the sweetness of our Lord. The image of sunshine is bold, almost baroque, but strangely unfitting for a reflective poem: it encourages the idea of the soul basking in the warmth of the sun. Faber often uses misplaced or tactless imagery, and the same objection could be made to a stanza from ‘The Eternal Years’: Death will have rainbows round it, seen Through calm contrition's tears,


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If tranquil hope but trims her lamp At the Eternal Years. There is an absence of the usual discipline of a hymn in such confusion of metaphor (rainbows ‘round’ Death, trimming a lamp at the years); it is part of a general tendency in Faber's work to slip from valuable and unusual seriousness into a well-meant vulgarity: Cheer up my soul! faith's moonbeams softly glisten Upon the breast of life's most troubled sea; And it will cheer thy drooping heart to listen To those brave songs which angels mean for thee. This ‘Cheer up’ is too back-slappy, too familiar (unlike Watts's ‘Come let us join our cheerful songs’), and the moonbeams on the sea are those of a sentimental landscape painting. Indeed, the whole hymn, ‘The Pilgrims of the Night’, suffers from a certain flamboyance of diction: Hark! hark! my soul! angelic songs are swelling O'er earth's green fields and ocean's wave-beat shore; The sound of these angelic harmonies ‘swelling’ (in a mysterious crescendo of sound) over the synecdoches for the created world, which themselves oversimplify it, anticipate film music, supplying the emotions to meet the images. As the hymn progresses, the landscape clichés are answered by spiritual ones—‘Life's shadows fall around us’, ‘Come, weary souls! for Jesus bids you come!’: Rest comes at length; though life be long and dreary, The day must dawn, and darksome night be past; All journeys end in welcomes to the weary, And Heaven, the heart's true home, will come at last. Faber may have been using such obvious and sentimental diction with a purpose. In the preface of 1849 he speaks (as hymn-writers often do at this time) of the effect of hymns on the poor, as though this was one way of touching the massive underclass of Victorian England. He cites Wesley and Cowper as examples: Less than moderate literary excellence, a very tame versification, indeed often the simple recurrence of a rhyme is sufficient: the spell seems to lie in that.480 Faber's prejudice against all forms of Protestantism must have blinded him to the fine technique and subtle art of Wesley and Cowper; and as a result of thinking that rhyme is somehow sufficient, he perpetrates some monstrosities of his own:

480

Faber, Hymns, p. xvi.

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O happy Pyx! O happy Pyx! Where Jesus doth his dwelling fix— (‘Holy Communion’) Similarly, ‘St Patrick's Day’ praises the saint because— For hundreds of years, In smiles and in tears, Our saint hath been with us, our shield and our stay. But rhyme, though a blemish, is not the chief problem, which is a much more interesting one. Faber writes of three saints, St Philip Neri, St Ignatius, and St Teresa, who lived ‘just as the heresy of Protestantism was beginning to devastate the world’; and as a priest of the Oratory of St Philip Neri, he clearly felt a special affinity with that saint, who ‘devised a changeful variety of spiritual exercises and recreations, which gathered round him the art and literature, as well as the piety of Rome’: He met the gloom and sourness and ungainly stiffness of the puritan element of Protestantism by cheerfulness and playful manners, which he ensured, not in any human way, but by leaving to his children the frequentation of the Sacraments as the chief object of their preaching and their chief counsel in the spiritual direction of others . . . there appeared at the Chiesa Nuova and the Gesu the less poetical, but thoroughly practical element of modern times, the common sense which works and wears so well in this prosaic world of ours.481 Faber is presenting his kind of Roman Catholicism as a religion for the nineteenth century, and his awareness of the ‘playful’ and the ‘practical’ may have led him to try some linguistic experiments which account for the unevenness of his verse. There is none of Pugin's lofty medievalism here, but a ‘thoroughly practical’ approach, an attempt to encounter the age on its own ground. Faber was presenting a God of love to the people of England, to those who were described by Matthew Arnold: The complaining millions of men Darken in labour and pain (‘The Youth of Nature’) Arnold saw Wordsworth as ‘a priest to us all’, and Faber (who was told by Wordsworth that England lost a poet when he became a priest) saw his hymn-writing function as an extension of his priestly office. He noted that there were very few Roman Catholic hymns, except for translations which ‘do not express Saxon thoughts and feelings, and consequently the poor do not seem to take to them’.482 He endeavoured to engage their interest by a representation of the Stations of the Cross:

481

Faber, Hymns, pp. xiv-xv.

482

Ibid., p. xv.


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From pain to pain, from woe to woe, With loving hearts and footsteps slow, To Calvary with Christ we go. See how His Precious Blood At every Station pours! Was ever grief like His? Was ever sin like ours? The most vivid of these hymns places the Blessed Virgin Mary in the foreground, summoning the singers to watch with her. The verse encourages a dramatic participation—‘See, Mary calls us . . . come and let us mourn’: O come and mourn with me awhile! See, Mary calls us to her side; O come and let us mourn with her; Jesus, our Love, is crucified! The relationship between Jesus and Mary is stressed throughout, and his dying is given additional pathos by the suggestion that His falling eyes He strove to guide With mindful love to Mary's face; In his narrative, Faber comes very close to Protestant writers on the crucifixion, and yet remains different from them. Charles Wesley wrote: Then let us sit beneath His Cross, And gladly catch the healing stream— (‘O love divine! what hast Thou done’) and Faber takes this one stage further: Come, take thy stand beneath the Cross, And let the Blood from out that Side Fall gently on thee drop by drop; Jesus, our Love, is crucified! which ought to be unexceptionable, given the metaphor of the sprinkled blood from Hebrews 11: 28, 12: 24, but which is as shocking as Cowper's fountain. The blood, as Faber reminds his readers in ‘The Precious Blood’, comes from Mary as well: Hail, Jesus! Hail! who for my sake Sweet Blood from Mary's veins did take And shed it all for me; and Mary, Queen and Mother, ‘Spouse and servant/Of the Holy Ghost’, becomes not only the subject of the daily hymn for the children of St Philip's Home, but also the mother to whom the orphans sing:

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We have none but thee to love us With a Mother's fondling care; (‘The Orphan's Consecration to Mary’) The powerful image of Mary as mother-substitute is given more support by the interaction between her example and that of the saints. The hymn to St Wilfrid, ‘for the children of St Wilfrid's at Manchester’, shows how this leads to Roman Catholic mission: To Mary's lovers thou, Sweet Saint! hast shown the road; Oh teach us how to love The Mother of our God. Give us thy love of work, Thy spirit's manly powers, And teach us how to save This Saxon land of ours. ‘Saxon’ for Faber (like ‘Anglo-Saxon’ for Matthew Arnold) was a term that was used (here and in the 1849 preface) to denote a stubborn Germanic, Protestant Englishness; while Arnold looked to Celtic literature as a counter to it, Faber looked to Rome. His ‘Faith of our Fathers’ became a hymn as tightly bound to generations of Roman Catholics as Wesley's hymns were to the Methodists: Faith of our Fathers! Mary's prayers Shall win our country back to thee; And through the truth that comes from God England shall then indeed be free. Faith of our Fathers! Holy Faith! We will be true to thee till death. ‘Till death’ means ‘all our lives’; but the underlying image is one of martyrdom (suggested also by the ‘Fathers’). Faber would love to have been born in the age of Edmund Campion and Robert Southwell: Our Fathers, chained in prison dark, Were still in heart and conscience free: How sweet would be their children's fate, If they, like them, could die for thee! Faith of our Fathers! Holy Faith! We will be true to thee till death. The hymn's language is uplifting and inspirational, well calculated to appeal to ardent young minds; but its language is fatally undermined by the temper of an age in which (as George Eliot acknowledged when writing about St Teresa in Middlemarch) there was little scope for such dramatic response. There were, of course, devoted missionaries who went out to


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West Africa and India, and died within months of cholera or yellow fever; but for most of the singers of the hymn, the rhetoric was aspiring and inspirational rather than appropriate to their daily circumstances. Faber's hymn is grandly enthusiastic, but also obviously rhetorical, with its repetition at the end of each verse which calls for unconditional sacrifice. A similar technique of repetition, more effectively applied, is found in ‘My God! how wonderful Thou art’, where the ‘how’ is carried on through the first three verses—‘how bright . . . how beautiful . . . how dread’, How beautiful, how beautiful The sight of Thee must be,— The response to this is another ‘how’: ‘Oh how I fear Thee, living God!’; the hymn then modulates from fear to love, pivoting on ‘Yet’—‘Yet I may love Thee too, O Lord!’ The art of the hymn is seen at its best in verse 7, where ‘No father . . . No mother’ is followed by the echoing ‘Bears and forbears’, to finish with a line of utter simplicity: No earthly father loves like Thee, No mother half so mild Bears and forbears, as Thou hast done, With me Thy sinful child. It is characteristic of Faber's unevenness as a hymn-writer that this well-shaped and thoughtful verse should have been succeeded by a banal conclusion: Only to sit and think of God, Oh what a joy it is! To think the thought, to breathe the Name, Earth has no higher bliss! Father of Jesus, love's Reward! What rapture will it be, Prostrate before Thy Throne to lie And gaze and gaze on Thee! Faber is as enthusiastic as Charles Wesley about heaven, but instead of ‘Lost in wonder, love, and praise’, he produces an image that is unseemly and tasteless. ‘Gaze and gaze’ has none of the subtlety of ‘Bears and forbears’ which it may be trying to echo. Faber has been carried away by his own ardent enthusiasm, which so often leads him into an excess and a failure of decorum—as in the image of ‘all sunshine’ in ‘Souls of men! why will ye scatter’. Undermining all his hymn-writing, indeed, is the fatal image of ‘sweetness’: words such as ‘sweet’ and ‘sweetly’, as well as ‘sweetness’, are as common as ‘dark’ in Heber or ‘little’ in Alexander. They reveal not only Faber's enthusiasm, but also a kind of naïvety which disturbs the reader or singer: it is as if Faber can never quite be trusted to get to the end of a hymn

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without making the singer uncomfortable or embarrassed at some point, in ways which undercut his very commendable desire to write for the nineteenth century, and for the Roman Catholic Church in England.

Edward Caswall Edward Caswall was a Church of England clergyman who resigned his living in 1846 to follow Newman into the Roman Catholic Church. After the death of his wife in 1849, he moved in the following year to the Birmingham Oratory, where he became a priest in 1852. He had already published Lyra Catholica in 1849 (with a preface dated 1848) as the first-fruits of his conversion; his joy in religion is clearly manifested in the book, and its title proclaims its origin and inspiration. He was, like all the converts of that period, convinced of the rightness of his decision, and wrote at least one patronizing piece of verse to those who had not converted: Dear friends, I know you mean your best, Thinking to serve your Lord and mine, When thus you pluck me from your breast For having join'd His Church divine. O if ye knew!—but words are vain; Ye cannot learn what ye despise: And it is idle to explain The truth to those who shut their eyes;— (‘A Remonstrance’) Caswall's habitual good temper emerges here as condescension: if Newman, not surprisingly, saw Caswall's poems as ‘the fresh upwelling of thy tranquil spirit’,483 on occasions such as this his spirit is far from benign. What makes his hymnody worth preserving is a quality which Newman indicates with his adjective ‘fresh: When morning gilds the skies, My heart awaking cries, May Jesus Christ be praised! The hymn, like much of Caswall's work, is a translation: but there is no mistaking the buoyant energy with which the singer is conducted to the joyful third line. In hymns such as this, Caswall's voice seems indeed fresh, welling up from some inner happiness, and charged with delight. What distinguishes his work from that of Faber, however, is the way in which that delight is held within a strong verse-form: Caswall, more than most hymn-writers, works in whole stanzas rather than in lines or couplets:

483

Edward Caswall, Hymns and Poems, Original and Translated, with a biographical preface by Edward Bellasis (London, 1908), 15.


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Bethlehem, of noblest cities None can once with thee compare; Thou alone the Lord from heaven Didst for us incarnate bear. Although the syntax is distorted, there is no sense here that Caswall is being forced into difficult word-orders. From the first arresting ‘Bethlehem’ he knows exactly where he is going, and paces the stanza well. It is also beautifully balanced in its parallelism—the opening ‘Bethlehem’ is taken up in ‘Thou alone’, and the auxiliary and main verbs make a perfect repetition, ‘can . . . compare/Didst . . . bear’. The next verse operates through dignified rhetorical inversions, with predicates or adverbial clauses preceding the verb or subject: Fairer than sun at morning Was the star that told his birth; To the lands their God announcing, Hid beneath a form of earth. The inversions continue in the following verse, but the double ‘See’ focuses attention in a different way, adding variety and producing a different shape: By its lambent beauty guided, See, the Eastern kings appear; See them bend, their gifts to offer,— Gifts of incense, gold, and myrrh. It is a picture that is familiar from a thousand paintings, but it comes in well as a verbal picture here because of the shape and form of the verse: the three kings, with their three gifts, fit into the three lines to give a sense of a complete picture, with no irrelevancies. The first line, which prepares the way, contains the unexpected and attractive word ‘lambent’, meaning ‘shining with a soft clear light’: it is an interesting word for Caswall to use, and characteristic of his love of light, which is found everywhere in his hymns. In his ‘Breviary Hymns special to the Season’, for example, his Advent hymn picks up the light/darkness imagery of the Advent Collect: Hark! an awful voice is sounding; ‘Christ is nigh!’ it seems to say; ‘Cast away the dreams of darkness, O ye children of the day!’ This imagery, and his skilful handling of the verse-forms, have made Caswall's hymns well known outside Roman Catholic hymnals. He said that he never refused any application to use them ‘from whatever quarter it came, wishing that if there was anything good in them, it should be the common property of all’.484 Protestants have accordingly made good use of

484

Ibid. 10.

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them, quietly dropping the verses they did not like, such as the final one of ‘See, amid the winter's snow’: Virgin Mother, Mary blest By the joys that fill thy breast, Pray for us that we may prove Worthy of the Saviour's love. Caswall's use of the word ‘See’ in this hymn, which parallels the one in ‘Bethlehem, of noblest cities’ is part of a technique which is intended to take the attention away from the beholder and on to the subject. It occurs twice in the first verse, and is followed by ‘Lo’ in the second: See, amid the winter's snow, Born for us on earth below, See, the Lamb of God appears, Worshipped from eternal years. Lo, within a manger lies He who built the starry skies,— In the preface to Lyra Catholica Caswall spoke of ‘the exceedingly plain and practical character’ of his hymns,485 and spoke of them as ‘eminently objective’: Their character is eminently objective. Their tendency is, to take the individual out of himself; to set before him, in turn, all the varied and sublime Objects of Faith; and to blend him with the universal family of the Faithful. In this respect they utterly differ from the hymn-books of modern heretical bodies, which, dwelling as they do, almost entirely on the state and emotions of the individual, tend to inculcate the worst of all egotisms.486 His dislike of the evangelical attention to the soul and its salvation means that a hymn such as ‘See, amid the winter's snow’ is remarkably chaste in its presentation of the Christmas scene. Its plain character comes from its verse-form, with the seven-syllable couplets neatly arranged to give precision and order. It develops into a dialogue between the singers and the shepherds (‘Say, ye holy shepherds, say’. . .‘As we watched at dead of night’), and then into a reflection on the divine love. It eschews any reference to the individual: the singers are too busy taking part in the drama, asking the shepherds questions and exclaiming at the wonder of the Incarnation. Only in the final verse (in most hymnbooks—the penultimate one in Caswall's original version) does the tone slip: Teach, O teach us, holy Child, By Thy face so meek and mild, Teach us to resemble Thee In Thy sweet humility.

485

Edward Caswall, ‘Preface’, Lyra Catholica (London, 1849), p. viii.

486

Ibid., p. ix.


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This is Faber's adjective ‘sweet’ occurring again, to give an unfortunate turn to a hymn which has up to this point been clear and sharp. In the singing, fortunately, it is succeeded by the refrain, which chimes against the verses with great skill: Hail, thou ever-blessed morn! Hail, redemption's happy dawn! Sing through all Jerusalem: Christ is born in Bethlehem! The commands ring out like bells—‘Hail . . . Hail . . . Sing’—and the two city-names call to each other ‘Jerusalem . . . Bethlehem’ (Jerusalem is a city, the capital, but of course also symbolic of any great place). Moreover, the refrain provides the redemptive theology, leaving the verses to get on with the narrative and the reflection. The skill of Caswall's hymn, its clever balancing of one mode against another, of one couplet against another, and of one name against another, allows both the portrayal of the Christmas story and the reflection upon it to be clearly articulated. The theology, as might be expected, deals with the coming of light out of darkness, with the sunrise and the happy dawn; and that is found in many of Caswall's hymns. From the ‘Hymns Special to Saints’ comes one to St Paul, which selects charity as the great gift (leaving faith and hope behind on earth) and celebrates it in terms of light: Lead us, great teacher Paul, in wisdom's ways, And lift our hearts with thine to Heaven's high throne; Till Faith beholds the clear meridian blaze, And sunlike in the soul reigns Charity alone. However, the joy in light would not be so great if there were not the contrast with darkness. So Caswall thinks of the Cross in his translation of the evening hymn, ‘Sol praeceps rapitur, proxima nox adest’: The sun is sinking fast; The daylight dies; Let love awake and pay Her evening sacrifice. As Christ upon the Cross In death reclined, Into His Father's hands His parting soul resign'd; So now herself my soul Would wholly give, Into His sacred charge In whom all spirits live: So now beneath His eye Would gladly rest,—

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The plainness is evident in the short lines and simple phrases, but so too is the delicate way in which the verses are connected one to the other. Gradually, the language becomes neater in its parallels and oppositions, as the soul becomes Dead to herself; and dead In Him to all beside, Thus would I live;—yet now Not I, but He In all His power and love Henceforth alive in me! ‘Not I, but He’: the contrast exploits all the power of the short line, until in the last verse the link between God and the human soul becomes a Herbert-like playing with ‘mine’ and ‘thine’: One sacred Trinity! One Lord divine! Myself for ever His! And He for ever mine! This joyful vision is to be seen in the context of death and the possibility of hell. Caswall's clarity becomes spinechilling at certain moments: Days and moments quickly flying Blend the living with the dead; Soon will you and I be lying Each within our narrow bed. His translation of a hymn by St Francis Xavier, ‘O deus ego amo te’, has a fourth line which shocks by its calm statement of the terrible (so much so that most hymn-books amend it): My God, I love thee, not because I hope for Heaven thereby: Nor yet because who love Thee not, Must burn eternally. In this kind of hymn Caswall's clarity and plainness are very effective; and his stanzas are well constructed, line by line fitting together: Thou, O my Jesus, Thou didst me Upon the Cross embrace; For me didst bear the nails and spear, And manifold disgrace;— The first line, and especially the end of it, seems clumsy at first sight; but Caswall, as always, knows what he is doing and where he is going. His hymn-writing is invariably fresh, neat and clean, and at its best it conveys its


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meaning with absolute certainty and considerable charm. Even Faber's word ‘sweet’ can survive in his hands: Jesu! the very thought of Thee With sweetness fills my breast; But sweeter far thy face to see, And in thy presence rest. This (‘Jesu, dulcis memoria’) is one of the many translations at which Caswall excelled, although he modestly proclaimed their inferiority to the originals: ‘it is to be feared, the unadorned simplicity of the prototype has too often degenerated into plainness; while its beauties have been faintly reflected, and their clear edge blunted in passing through a too earthly medium.’487 From the translator who gave us ‘O Jesus, King most wonderful’, ‘At the Cross her station keeping’, and ‘Come, thou Holy Spirit, come’ this is altogether too modest a claim.

John Mason Neale John Mason Neale is the most important Anglican hymn-writer—if we except Charles Wesley, who died a member of the Church of England but whose hymns were rapidly taken over by the Methodists and used almost exclusively by them for nearly a century. In Hymns Ancient and Modern Neale had over sixty hymns, far outnumbering those of others; and his influence on the subsequent course of hymn-writing, both Anglican and ecumenical, has been considerable. He followed Keble, Richard Mant, and others in finding a valuable source in ancient and medieval hymns, but did so more grandly than many of his predecessors; and he added his own contributions from Eastern Church hymnody, the Eastern Church being a particular love of his. Neale's parents had been evangelicals, but he was one of the founders of the Camden Society at Cambridge, and he continued to use ritual and symbolism in his religious practice at Sackville College, East Grinstead. The chapel there, which lay outside episcopal jurisdiction, was furnished with what his frustrated bishop denounced as ‘spiritual haberdashery’; but Neale's life there also showed a considerable concern for the welfare of others, and he founded a community of nurses entitled the St Margaret's Sisterhood. Life in such a community suited Neale: in his Hymns, Chiefly Medieval, on the Joys and Glories of Paradise (1865) he described paradise as ‘the home, of which every religious house is the faint type’. His concern for the sick had begun much earlier, with Hymns for the Sick (1843). He had suffered himself from poor health for some time, and spent the winters in Madeira between 1843 and his appointment to Sackville

487

Ibid., p. x.

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College in 1846: it was this personal experience, in all probability, that caused his first hymn-book to be written for sick people. It was a very small book, printed on thin paper, so that it could be held by the very weak; and the hymns were strangely moving because they progressed inexorably towards the final two stages, ‘The Viaticum: or, The Communion of the Departing’, and ‘The Death of the Faithful’. The first anticipates Newman in The Dream of Gerontius: Go, Christian soul, to Him That did at first create, That did thy soul redeem, And did regenerate; Go, as the Saints and Martyrs went before; Go to that strife, which ended, strife is o'er! The second looks forward to one of Neale's grandest hymns ‘Jerusalem the golden’, with its vision of the heavenly city (and no doubt some of Neale's sick-bed experience, as priest or as patient, contributed to the power of that hymn): Thou, Who didst die and rise, that Thou might'st be Lord both of quick and dead; Who through the wilderness so lovingly Unto Jerusalem from Sion hast led; Thy Grace in us, poor exiles yet, implant Hymns for the Sick was about suffering, paralleled in the life of Christ, but also leading eventually to the heavenly city. Even so, it is hard to read ‘In Consumption’ with anything except exasperation and anger: Diseases minister to Thee, Thy summons to effect; And now Thou dost ordain for me The ‘death of Thine Elect’. A note to the last phrase adds: ‘Consumption is called by French Divines, La mort des élus, on account of the long warning which it gives, the mental vigour which it leaves, and its freedom, for the most part, from intense bodily pain; thus allowing the mind to be its own master.’ The fascination with illness, and the preparation of the soul for the next world, were common themes in Victorian hymnody, found especially in the hymns and lives of women writers; in Neale's work the two subjects were found with particular clarity. In ‘In Consumption’ the sufferer praises God: That gives me space, by slow decay, To call my thoughts apart, And hour by hour, and day by day, Sett'st free from earth my heart.


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Did'st Thou, O Saviour, freely drink Thy portion for my sake, And I, who suffer justly, shrink My proffered cup to take? The parallel between the sick person and the suffering Christ is frequently drawn, although it is not easy to see a consumptive as suffering justly, and the poem seems to put a distance between the innocent Christ and the ill human being. But Neale's tone and temper in this book, and his concern with sickness, sharpened his mind and senses for his great mystical hymnody (one of the volumes he contributed to was entitled Lyra Mistica). His mysticism is inextricably connected with his knowledge of affliction: Art thou weary, art thou languid, Art thou sore distrest? ‘Come to me’—saith One—‘and coming, Be at rest!’ This hymn was the first in The Invalid's Hymn Book (one of several collections of that name, another being by Charlotte Elliott), published in 1866 after Neale's death, ‘being a selection of hymns appropriate to the Sick-Room’. It included the best-known expression of Neale's favourite conception of grief turned to joy: Brief life is here our portion; Brief sorrow, short-lived care; The life that knows no ending, The tearless life, is THERE. The underlining and capitalizing of There, and its placing at the end of the line, point to it as the great destination, the place to which all things are directed and are moving: O happy retribution! Short toil, eternal rest; For mortals and for sinners A mansion with the blest! The rhymes, as always in Neale, are very important—rest/blest—while the other lines, with unrhymed two-syllabled endings, allow the final words in lines 2 and 4 to have all the more force: And there is David's Fountain, And life in fullest glow, And there the light is golden, And milk and honey flow: The light that hath no evening, The health that hath no sore, The life that hath no ending, But lasteth evermore.

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The vision of there, the other country (‘For thee, O dear, dear country’) is found at its most celebrated in ‘Jerusalem the golden’, where the same imagery appears, and where the 7.6.7.6. metre works by emphasizing the strong beats: Jerusalem the golden, With milk and honey blest, Beneath thy contemplation Sink heart and voice oppressed:— It is not surprising that Neale should have revived the sixteenth-century hymn by ‘F.B.P.’, ‘Hierusalem, my happy home’, which gave him an example of this mode of writing; nor that he should have reprinted lines from the fifteenthcentury ‘Prikke of Conscience’ in Hymns, Chiefly Medieval, on the Joys and Glories of Paradise: Ther is lyf withoute ony deth, And ther is youthe without ony elde, And ther is alle manner welthe to welde; And ther is rest without ony travaille;— But Neale is chiefly famous for his translations from Latin, Greek, and Eastern hymns. He noted the metrical similarities between English and Latin hymns, and the problems for a translator of the economy of Latin: ‘Though the superior terseness and brevity of the Latin Hymns renders a translation which shall represent these qualities a work of great labour, yet still the versifier has the help of the same metre; his version may be line for line; and there is a great analogy between the Collects and the Hymns, most helpful to the translator.’488 This is demonstrated in the 8.7.8.7. metre, more flexible and mellifluous than the heavy beats of ‘Jerusalem the golden’: Jerusalem luminosa, Verae pacis visio, Felix nimis ac formosa, Summi Regis mansio; De te o quam gloriosa Dicta sunt a saeculo! This becomes: Light's abode, Celestial Salem, Vision whence true peace doth spring, Brighter than the heart can fancy, Mansion of the highest King; O how glorious are the praises Which of thee the Prophets sing!

488

J. M. Neale, ‘Preface’, Hymns of the Eastern Church (London, 1862), pp. xi–xii.


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The two-line units are held together in the six-line stanza, providing the perpetually satisfying rhythm of 1-2-3, stately and yet graceful: There for ever and for ever Alleluia is outpoured; For unending, for unbroken, Is the feast-day of the Lord: All is pure, and all is holy, That within thy walls is stored. ‘There’, as it continually appears in Neale's verse, is wonderfully the opposite of ‘here’, especially for the sick and troubled: O quam vere gloriosum Eris, corpus fragile, Cum fueris tam formosum Forte, sanum, agile; Liberum, voluptuosum, In aevum durabile! which becomes the vision of abundant energy: O how glorious and resplendent, Fragile body, shalt thou be, When endued with so much beauty, Full of health, and strong, and free, Full of vigour, full of pleasure, That shall last eternally! Many of Neale's hymns were printed in The Hymnal Noted (1851 and 1854), published under the auspices of the Ecclesiological Society, which the Camden Society members, including Neale, had formed after leaving Cambridge (of the 105 hymns, Neale translated 95). It contained translations of some of the greatest ancient hymns, now available to English-speaking congregations: O quanta qualia sunt illa Sabbata O what their joy and their glory must be Te lucis ante terminum Before the ending of the day Corde natus ex Parentis Of the Father sole begotten O Amor quam extaticus O love, how deep, how broad, how high Vexilla Regis prodeunt The Royal Banners forward go Pange, lingua, gloriosi Sing, my tongue, the glorious battle

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Gloria, laus, et honor Glory, and laud, and honour O filii et filiae Ye sons and daughters of the King Veni, Sancte Spiritus Come, Thou Holy Paraclete Jerusalem luminosa Light's abode, celestial Salem Urbs beata Jerusalem Blessed City, Heav'nly Salem Angularis fundamentum Christ is made the sure foundation Many of these were subsequently altered, in ways which Neale would not have objected to, because he was the reverse of proprietorial about his hymns: ‘any compiler of a future Hymnal is perfectly welcome to make use of anything contained in this little book’, he wrote in the Preface to Hymns, Chiefly Medieval: I feel that a Hymn, whether original, or translated, ought, the moment it is published, to become the common property of Christendom; the author retaining no private right in it whatever.489 But although he was not possessive, Neale was concerned that his work should be widely known, and that the liturgical principles to which it related should be properly understood. In 1852 he published A Short Commentary on the Hymnal Noted, from Ancient Sources, Intended Chiefly for the Use of the Poor. The style was excellently clear: Neale was concerned to explain what he was doing in the simplest of terms. At the Reformation, he explained, the Prayer Book was put into English, but not the ancient hymns. Instead, the Reformers ‘put the psalms into verse, and sang them by way of hymns’: forgetting that the psalms are best to be sung in a very different way, namely by chanting them. At last people saw that hymns were wanted. But instead of looking back to the old hymns of the Church of England [i.e. the ones written before the Reformation], they wrote new ones: and so a great number of ‘collections’, that have no authority, came into the Church.490 Neale was distancing himself from modern hymnody here, from Madan, Toplady, Newton and Cowper, but also perhaps from the many collections

489

J. M. Neale, ‘Preface’, Hymns, Chiefly Medieval, on the Joys and Glories of Paradise (London, 1865), p. ix.

490

J. M. Neale, A Short Commentary on the Hymnal Noted (London, 1852), p. iv.


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of hymns printed for the use of individual churches. These ‘have no authority’: in that word ‘authority’ can be read Neale's preference for Church doctrine and order over the expression of personal experience. He was replacing the hymnody of personal witness with a hymnody that depended heavily on the authority of the Ancient Church, the Church Fathers, and the Saints, although often the writers were unknown—‘Of those whom we do know, some are among the greatest Saints that God has raised up in the Church’: These very hymns, then, have consoled thousands of God's faithful servants in all kinds of circumstances, almost from the days of the Apostles to our own:—and if on this account only, they ought to be dear to us.491 To this argument from antiquity, Neale adds another argument, which Charles Wesley would have recognized: But written as they were, not to order, not because they were wanted, but because the feelings of the writers were so warm at the moment that they would express themselves, written, as many of them were, by such great Saints,—they must have a depth and a fulness of meaning which cannot be expected in other hymns.492 Depth, and fullness of meaning: these were the characteristics of ancient hymnody that Neale singled out for approbation. He realized the need to re-educate the hymn-singing public: The hymns themselves, being so different from those to which we are chiefly accustomed, will perhaps, at first sight, seem strange and cold. But the more they are studied, the more their value will be seen and felt.493 Neale was engaged in a massive and innovative project, an attempt to swing the writing and appreciation of hymns away from a post-Reformation individualism into a nobler and deeper impersonality. And as Bishop Cosin's Private Devotions, two centuries earlier, had eschewed extempore prayer in favour of a disciplined approach to religious practice (Cosin's ‘Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire’ was included in the Hymnal Noted), so Neale's Short Commentary also took note of the days of the week, morning and evening, and hours of the day: ‘As the Holy Ghost came down at the Third Hour, the Church loves to pray to Him at the same hour.’494 Neale was fascinated by tradition, and saw hymns as hallowed by centuries of use: ‘This little hymn [Te lucis ante terminum, “Before the ending of the day”] has been said every night in the Church for more than a thousand years.’495 He thought that ‘Dies irae, dies illa’ was ‘generally allowed to be the finest Hymn that the Church possesses’: It needs scarcely any explanation, for the writer seems to have felt that, in looking forward to the end of all things, the plainer the words he used, the more reverent:

491

Ibid., ‘Preface’, p. v.

492

Ibid., p. v.

493

Ibid., p. vi.

494

Ibid. 5.

495

Ibid. 7.

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and it is this plain-ness of expression, joined to the greatness of the thoughts, that makes the Hymn so very fearful.496 Neale's commendations in his Short Commentary are useful in any attempt to describe his own practice in translation. He was a brilliant linguist and metricist (he is said to have confounded Keble by turning a poem from The Christian Year into Latin, and playfully confronting Keble with it as a precursor of his work) but the care and trouble that he exercised over his versions are evidence of the value he attached to the originals, and to all that they stood for. To sing a hymn that had been written by St Ambrose or St Fulbert of Chartres, or by Venantius Fortunatus, was to become a part of a long tradition of holiness and praise: in preferring the medieval, or pre-medieval, to the modern, Neale was a part of the Victorian pursuit of a romantic past, a culture that his contemporaries sought to revive in church buildings, civic architecture, poetry, and craftsmanship. Neale was the Ruskin or Morris of hymn-writing: his influence on the form was immense, and fuelled by the same impulses that led them to crusade against bad art and a corrupt society. So hymns such as ‘Jerusalem the golden’ glow with certainty and purpose: There is the throne of David; And there from care released, The shout of them that triumph, The song of them that feast; And they, who with their Leader Have conquered in the fight, For ever and for ever Are clad in robes of white. That certainty and purpose is conveyed by the simple language that Neale had recommended in the ‘Dies Irae’. In this verse the crucial words are ‘There’ (once again) and ‘Them/they’, those over there. It is astonishing to see how simple Neale can be, as in the Palm Sunday ‘Gloria, laus, et honor’: The Company of Angels Are praising Thee on high, And mortal men, and all things Created, make reply. The people of the Hebrews With Palms before Thee went; Our praise and prayer and anthems Before Thee we present. Such complete plainness of style is not always maintained, but in many places it succeeds in being very effective, as in Benjamin Webb's ‘O amor quam exstaticus’ (‘O Love, how deep, how broad, how high’):

496

J. M. Neale, A Short Commentary on the Hymnal Noted (London, 1852), 43.


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He sent no Angel to our race, Of higher or of lower place, But wore the robe of human frame, And He Himself to this world came. For as He preaches and He prays, Would do all things, would try all ways; By words, and signs, and actions, thus Still seeking not Himself, but us. There is a gentle and undemanding rhetoric in Webb's verses, with repetitions that signal the way—‘Of higher or of lower place . . . He preaches and He prays . . . Would do all things, would try all ways’. Neale's vocabulary is more spectacular, the single unexpected word lighting up the whole verse: Come, Thou Holy Paraclete, And from Thy Celestial seat Send Thy light and brilliancy. ‘Brilliancy’ and ‘radiancy’ (not uncommon words in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) are very useful, with their extra syllable at the end of each. Throughout the hymn these words of three or four syllables chime together, ending in ‘mystery’ and ‘felicity’: Here Thy grace and virtue send; Grant Salvation in the end, And in Heav'n felicity. The other qualities which Neale recommended in the Short Commentary were ‘depth’ and ‘fulness of meaning’. He used the metaphors themselves in the hymn for Sunday morning, ‘Hac die surgens Dominus’: But whence we came, and what our state, And whence we came, and why create, And whither we must soon depart, These thoughts to-day should fill the heart. But although there are images of these things, the principal source of depth and fullness in Neale's hymnody is found in the uncomplicated, transparent statement of the fundamentals of Christian teaching. Life is brief on earth (‘here’), to be lived in praise and prayer, in the light of Christian doctrine—the Holy Trinity, the observance of rites and disciplines, and the life of Christ, especially his birth, his sufferings and death, and his resurrection. This brief life is followed by life in heaven (‘there’), when the soul will taste the joys of the new Jerusalem. It is the presentation, and representation, of these fundamentals that Neale attempts: he does not interpolate his own

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experience, but allows them to stand alone, to be pondered on in all their depth, and to fill the mind with ideas of glory. Neale was one of the great poets of Christmas. In addition to ‘Of the Father sole begotten’ (now usually altered), he wrote the Dickensian and philanthropic ‘Good King Wenceslas’, and his Carols for Christmastide, with music by Thomas Helmore, was published in 1853. More central to his doctrinal position, however, was the Easter story (he published Carols for Eastertide in 1854). This was almost certainly the result of his long and pioneering attempt to bring to Western Christianity some of the insights and practices of the Eastern Church, in what Leon Litvack has called ‘the quest for sobornost’. ‘Sobornost’ means harmony, unity in diversity, tolerance, understanding: Neale hoped that the influence of the Eastern Church could be brought to bear upon the fractious and divided Church of England in the nineteenth century. He therefore wrote a history of the Eastern Church, and novels about it: he also published Hymns of the Eastern Church in 1862, with hymns from the Greek and a commentary (including a vivid description of Easter in Athens).497 Neale was aware that he was proposing an entirely new resource for Anglican worship: the hymns, as he pointed out, had often been translated, but Greek Church poetry was unknown. It posed difficulties—choice of metre, length of text (Neale favoured ‘centos’, or selections); and he had much ado in the Preface to explain the various forms, the strophe or Hirmos, the stanzas or Troparia, the Ode (made up of a number of Troparia) and the Canon (nine Odes). But he regarded all this as worth while. He spoke in conclusion of the marvellous ignorance in which English ecclesiastical scholars are content to remain of this huge treasure of divinity—the gradual compilation of nine centuries at least. I may safely calculate that not one out of twenty who peruse these pages will ever have read a Greek ‘Canon’ through; yet what a glorious mass of theology do these offices present!498 These Greek hymns are sometimes very simple, and just as Neale was impressed by the antiquity of Latin hymns, so he writes movingly of life in the Greek islands: ‘The day is past and over’ is to the scattered hamlets of Chios and Mitylene, what Bishop Ken's Evening Hymn is to the villages of our own land; and its melody is singularly plaintive and soothing. ‘Soothing’ is again the recommended word: the hymn repeats itself (‘past and over’) but that is part of its lulling charm: The day is past and over: All thanks, O Lord, to Thee!

497

See Leon Litvack, J. M. Neale and the Quest for Sobornost (Oxford, 1994).

498

Neale, Hymns of the Eastern Church, p. xli.


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I pray Thee now, that sinless The hours of dark may be. O Jesu! keep me in Thy sight, And save me through the coming night! The ‘Stichera for Christmastide’ appear to be equally straightforward in their diction, but they are an attempt to portray something much more complex: A great and mighty wonder, The festal makes secure: The Virgin bears the Infant With Virgin-honour pure. The Word is made Incarnate, And yet remains on high: And Cherubim sing anthems To shepherds from the sky. Doctrine and picture go together: the simplicity of the last two lines rescues the hymn from intractable pronouncements of the mystery of the Incarnation. It is as if complicated meditation is laid aside as the reader contemplates the well-known story of the shepherds in the fields abiding. The Greek hymns translated by Neale are often vivid and pictorial in this way. That vividness is the main point of the ‘Stichera for the Second Week of the Great Fast’ by St Andrew of Crete: Christian! dost thou see them On the holy ground, How the troops of Midian Prowl and prowl around? The hymn is a command to be watchful and aware, to recognize the dangers of temptation. Three verses begin ‘see them . . . feel them . . . hear them’: the third is especially dramatic, as the voices of the tempters are heard in sardonic, undermining questions: Christian! dost thou hear them, How they speak thee fair? Always fast and vigil? Always watch and prayer? Christian! answer boldly: While I breathe I pray: Peace shall follow battle, Night shall end in day. The hymn interrupts the speaker's voice, then allows it back to counter the fair-speaking tempters; after which there comes another voice:

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‘Well I know thy trouble, O My servant true; Thou art very weary,— I was weary too: But that toil shall make thee Some day, all Mine own: But the end of sorrow Shall be near My throne.’ The speech, by a still small voice, is final: it is Christ himself who has the last word. The promise of Paradise is everywhere in these hymns. Neale's Resurrection hymn, from St John Damascene, is described in Hymns of the Eastern Church as the ‘Glorious old Hymn of Victory’: 'Tis the Day of Resurrection: Earth! tell it out abroad! The Passover of Gladness! The Passover of God! From Death to Life Eternal,— From earth unto the sky, Our Christ hath brought us over, With hymns of victory. Here, as Leon Litvack has pointed out,499 Neale cleverly uses imagery of the Jewish Passover, the life-saving action of God transferred to the Redemption by Christ, the Moses who ‘brought us over’ from death to life. Once again the ‘Here’ and ‘There’ of Neale's hymnody is found, in ‘From earth unto the sky’, and so is the possibility of being aware, expressed in images of seeing and hearing: Our hearts be pure from evil, That we may see aright The Lord in rays eternal Of Resurrection-Light: And, listening to His accents, May hear, so calm and plain, His own—All Hail!—and hearing, May raise the victor strain! The use of biblical typology is seen in another hymn, for St Thomas's Sunday, also from St John Damascene. Here the rhythm is no longer iambic but trochaic: Come, ye faithful, raise the strain Of triumphant gladness! God hath brought his Israel Into joy from sadness:

499

Litvack, 131 ff.


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Loosed from Pharaoh's bitter yoke Jacob's sons and daughters; Led them with unmoistened foot Through the Red Sea waters. Neale's mastery of metre, gained (like Charles Wesley's) from an education in writing Greek and Latin verses, is one of the reasons why his hymns are so immediately convincing. The lines are individually strong, and they make powerful verses: O happy band of pilgrims If onward ye will tread With Jesus as your Fellow To Jesus as your Head! This comes from a hymn by St Joseph of the Studium, a poet of the ninth century. Like most of Neale's hymnody, it brings a new expression into English hymn-writing, brought from the Early Church to be received, revivified, and used. As such, it has a character of its own, a striking directness and an authenticity that comes from age and tradition. The images are often traditional, and the doctrine central: there is none of the originality of Watts or Wesley. Above all, in Neale, the reader or singer can see what Keble meant by his apparent recipe for dullness—‘don't be original’. Neale presents an unadorned yet assured version of the Christian Gospel, without trying to ‘make it new’ (rather, he is trying to ‘keep it old’), and without trying to impose himself and his individual experience on the received doctrine. He is best in his expression of the great occasions—Christmas, Easter—and his awareness of the hardness of human life (his hymns for sick people are testimonies of his sensitivity to pain and misery); but above all, he is the poet of heaven. In the late Greek hymn from the Canon of St John Climacos, it appears in different forms: Safe home, safe home in port! —Rent cordage, shattered deck, Torn sails, provisions short, And only not a wreck: But oh! the joy upon the shore, To tell our voyage-perils o'er! The metaphors change from verse to verse: ‘The prize, the prize secure! . . . ’ ‘The lamb is in the fold . . . ’ ‘The exile is at home!’ . . . ‘O happy, happy Bride!’ Neale's perception of the joys of heaven, the ‘vision dear whence peace doth spring’, is filled with a mystical rapture that has affinities with Revelation 21, as mediated through the Greek and Latin hymn-writers. The paramount symbol is that of the new Jerusalem, the holy city, where the streets are golden, the sabbaths are endless, and the praise is everlasting:

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They stand, those halls of Zion, Conjubilant with song, And bright with many an angel, And all the martyr throng; and it is this vision which gives Neale his confidence, a confidence which communicated itself to other hymn-writers, which helped to ensure the success of Hymns Ancient and Modern, and which, together with Keble, inspired a whole generation of Victorian hymn-writers.

15 Hymns Ancient and Modern The Anglican movement which commenced in the fourth decade of this century has nurtured a retrospective and historical piety, which opens its heart to the traditions of the past, reproduces forgotten treasures of poetry and prayer and devoted life, and clings for strength to the last link in the catena of saintly examples . . . With this influence, however, resting as it does on Catholic authority, is inextricably blended an ecclesiastical type of Christianity. (James Martineau, Preface to Hymns of Praise and Prayer, 1874) Hymns Ancient and Modern was conceived on the Great Western Railway. Two clergymen, W. Denton and F. H. Murray, were travelling together in the summer of 1858: both had already edited (or part-edited) hymn-books, two of the many that had sprung up in individual parishes to counter the attractions of Nonconformist hymn-singing. They agreed to abandon plans for their own books, and to ‘write in an endeavour to promote one good one’.500 They enlisted the help of Sir Henry Williams Baker, squire and vicar of Monkland in Herefordshire, who became secretary to the committee and the dominant force in it.501 From the beginning an attempt was made to involve as many people as possible in the project, with an advertisement inviting submissions and suggestions from ‘the CLERGY and OTHERS interested in Hymnology’502. Those who replied were subsequently sent proofs of some of the sections for comment—‘partly’, as Baker put it, ‘in order to get their criticims and partly to keep up their expectations and interest’.503 This can be seen as part of a shrewd marketing strategy on Baker's part, designed to attract potential purchasers (encouraged also by the promise of a cheap edition at 6d). A final circular promised the book by Advent Sunday, 1860,

500

Susan Drain, The Anglican Church in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Hymns Ancient and Modern (1860–1875) (Lewiston, Lampeter, Queenston, 1989), 102.

501

Owing to a misunderstanding, Denton dropped out. See Drain, pp. 103–5.

502

Drain, The Anglican Church, 109.

503

Ibid. 117.

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when a words-only edition was published, followed by a music edition in March 1861. Looking at the 273 hymns in their dingy brown binding to-day, it is not easy to see why the book was such an instant success. One reason must have been Baker's skilful drawing-in of many different interested parties; another must have been shrewd marketing on the part of Novello, Ewer and Co., the publishers, who advertised on the back endpaper numerous editions to suit all pockets, beginning with a paper-covered 32mo at 2 1/2d. Another must have been the fortuitous timing of the book: some of its rivals, such as William Mercer's Church Psalter and Hymn Book (1854) and Edward Bickersteth's Christian Psalmody (1833), had been around for some time, and there was a wealth of fine new material waiting to be incorporated (especially by J. M. Neale and Catherine Winkworth). The editors were able to gather up material from many different traditions: although the book has been described as ‘a Tractarian manifesto’,504 it was broad enough in scope and intention to escape the criticism of being a partisan book. It was clear that the compilers had taken seriously Keble's advice to ‘make it comprehensive’.505 Finally, the musical editing, by W. H. Monk, was inspired: as Erik Routley has picturesquely written, the book ‘arranged marriages between certain hymns and their tunes which have been regarded in many cases as indissoluble for a century since’.506 These included ST ANNE for ‘O God, our help in ages past’, EVENTIDE for ‘Abide with me’ (written by Monk himself), NICAEA for ‘Holy, holy, holy’, FRANCONIA for ‘Blest are the pure in heart’.507 Monk's name appeared on the title-page; this was the only exception to the otherwise rigorous impersonality of the book (it was sometimes known as ‘Monk's book’).508 Nowhere did the names of the editorial committee appear, and the hymns were printed without authors' names, or the names of the tunes (names, composers, and arrangers were found in an index). The result was a book that concentrated the mind on the words and music, and the biblical text that was quoted at the head of each hymn: it allowed the texts to stand without the problems of religious controversy, burying High Church and Low Church, Tractarian and Dissenter, beneath the uniformity of the type-face. Watts and Wesley were quietly included beside Neale and Heber, Montgomery and Doddridge beside Keble and Caswall. The committee refused to be influenced by the suggestion that the book should be confined ‘without exception to the productions of Churchmen’.509

504

W. K. Lowther Clarke, A Hundred Years of Hymns Ancient and Modern (London, 1960), 31.

505

‘Preface’, Hymns Ancient and Modern, Historical Edition (London, 1909), p. cvi.

506

Erik Routley, The Music of Christian Hymnody (London, 1957), 119.

507

For a full list see Routley, p. 120.

508

For a fuller assessment of Monk's contribution, see B. S. Massey, ‘William Henry Monk, 1823–89’, Bulletin of the Hymn Society, 179 (April 1989), 98–9.

509



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The first five hymns demonstrate, in little, the ecumenical character of the book. Bishop Ken started the book off with ‘Awake, my soul, and with the sun’, a first hymn that set the tone as surely as ‘O for a thousand tongues to sing’ had done for Wesley's 1780Collection. Ken's hymn was in the centre of the Church of England tradition, as defined in the Preface to the Book of Common Prayer (in ‘her Publick Liturgy, to keep the mean between two extremes’), and although it was immediately followed by ‘New every morning is the love’ from The Christian Year, Charles Wesley's ‘Christ, whose glory fills the skies’ was found at 5. Between Keble and Wesley were two translations from Latin hymns, ‘Splendor Paternae Gloriae’ (‘O Jesu, Lord of light and grace’) and ‘Iam lucis orto sidere’ (‘Now that the daylight fills the sky’). These were the first of many translations from ancient hymns in the book (the attractive—and accurate-—title is said to have been suggested by Monk).510 English hymns outnumbered Latin ones in the first edition, but only just.511 As with authors' names, there was no indication of the Latin source (perhaps to avoid trouble from militant, and sometimes violent, anti-papists). The balance that was struck in the opening section was maintained throughout. As an example, the Epiphany section, 58–66, contains the following: 58. What star is this, with beams so bright’ (Charles Coffin, from the Paris Breviary, 1736, translated by J Chandler, in Hymns of the Primitive Church, 1837). 59. ‘Earth has many a noble city’ (Prudentius, translated by Edward Caswall, Lyra Catholica, 1849). 60. ‘Why doth that impious Herod fear’ (Sedulius, translated by J. M. Neale, The Hymnal Noted, 1852). 61. ‘The people that in darkness sat’ (John Morison, from the Scottish Paraphrases, 1781, much altered). 62. ‘The heavenly child in stature grows’ (J. B. de Santeuil, Hymni Sacri, 1689, translated by J. Chandler, Hymns of the Primitive Church, 1837). 63. ‘God of mercy, God of grace’ (H.F. Lyte, The Spirit of the Psalms, 1834). 64. ‘As with gladness men of old’ (W.C. Dix, written 1860, privately printed in his Hymns of Love and Joy). 65. ‘Jesu! the very thought is sweet!’ (Latin, translated by J. M. Neale, The Hymnal Noted, 1852). 66. ‘Hail to the Lord's Anointed’ (James Montgomery, written 1821, published in his Original Hymns, 1853).

510

Massey, ‘William Henry Monk’, 98–9.

511

Drain has calculated 133 English Hymns, 127 Latin Hymns, 10 German in the first edition (p. 254).

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The structure of the book maintained the same balance. It was described on the title-page as Hymns Ancient and Modern, for use in the Services of the Church, and it followed the Prayer Book in beginning with morning and evening, one hymn for each day of the week (except Sunday, which has five) and marking the principal stages of the Church year, from Advent through to Trinity Sunday (ending with Heber's ‘Holy, Holy, Holy!’). From then on (136 to 202 inclusive) there were ‘General Hymns’, beginning with ‘All people that on earth do dwell’, a good example of Reformation metrical psalmody; with a return to the Prayer Book at the end (203–3), Holy Communion, Baptism, Confirmation, Holy Matrimony, special occasions, Saints' days). It was a delicate balancing act, but it worked, partly (we may guess) because of skilful promotion, including widespread clerical involvement, and partly through the uniform presentation of many different strands of hymnody. The book's success was remarkable: four and a half million copies had been sold by 1868. In that year, the editors produced an Appendix, with a preface that both praised God and drew attention to their own success: The Compilers of Hymns Ancient and Modern for use in the Services of the Church cannot send forth an Appendix to that book without the expression of their deep gratitude to Almighty God for the marvellous success with which He has been pleased to bless their former work. The Almighty may have been given the credit, but a good deal of the achievement was owing to the ruthless treatment of competitors. ‘Our Book was compiled with the distinct and avowed object of diminishing the existing diversity of Hymnals’ was how Sir Henry Williams Baker put it to a clergyman wishing to include some tunes and words in his own book,512 and in the early years there was a consistent policy of refusing permission to any book which might be a competitor.513 Baker, a country parson and local squire, presents an unlikely example of Victorian bourgeois capitalism at its most individual and competitive. The Appendix of 1868, as Susan Drain has pointed out, was important evidence that the compilers were becoming more ambitious.514 It included another 50 ‘General Hymns’ (294–343), and others for Evening, Easter, Holy Communion (including Dix's magnificent ‘Alleluia, sing to Jesus’) and other occasions. Another new venture was a section (361–9) ‘For the Young’, which included ‘Once in royal David's City’ and ‘Now the day is over’. Newman's ‘Lead, kindly light’ was included, and so was his brand-new ‘Praise to the Holiest in the height’, from The Dream of Gerontius of 1865 (given a daring tune by J. B. Dykes, GERONTIUS, which has become

512


513

Ibid. 196 ff.

514

Ibid. 202.


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inseparably linked to the words—in Church worship, not of course in Elgar's inspired and passionate Oratorio). The Appendix was part of a very successful campaign to keep the book ahead of its competitors. It continued with the ‘Revised and Enlarged Edition of 1875’ which added ninety-three new hymns and removed eleven, and a Supplement of 1889. These editions established Hymns Ancient and Modern as a standard book, unchallenged in its universal adoption until the early twentieth century. They are also evidence of the increasing confidence and ambition of the proprietors. Such was its influence on the pattern of public worship that there was some discussion of the possibility of an official Church of England hymn-book, and twenty years later there was an unofficial approach to the proprietors to ask if a revision of Hymns Ancient and Modern might become that book.515

The Inuence of Hymns Ancient and Modern The nineteenth century was the great period of Church of England hymnody. As soon as the Anglican clergy had understood the possibilities of hymn-singing, they began to write hymns, and edit hymn-books; and the success of Hymns Ancient and Modern encouraged a new generation to emulate Heber and Milman and Lyte (a bishop, a dean, and a parish priest). The flowering of Anglican hymnody in the two decades after 1861 is astonishing, a phenomenon which has its own character and speaks its own period (and its own pride and confidence) as clearly as a Victorian church building or a stained-glass window. An example may be found in the work of Sir Henry Williams Baker himself, ‘The King of love my Shepherd is’. Baker was a bold man to tread in the steps of Whittingham, Herbert, and Addison, but his metrical psalm registers a tone as clear, and representative of its time, as theirs. The decision to use an 8.7.8.7. metre also helps to distinguish his version from others, because it allowed double rhymes (Baker was fond of double rhymes, most notably in ‘Lord, thy word abideth’). It also allows the delicate transformation of the earlier phrases, which he could not avoid. Herbert's third line, ‘While He is mine and I am His’, becomes I nothing lack if I am His And He is mine for ever. The directness of Herbert has given way to something else, a consciously shaped chiasmus. Similarly ‘He leads me to the tender grass’ becomes Where streams of living water flow My ransomed soul he leadeth,

515

Ibid. 204–7.

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And where the verdant pastures grow With food celestial feedeth. This is closer to Addison than to Herbert, with its reference to ‘verdant pastures’: but the singer is no longer a sheep but a ransomed soul who feeds on ‘food celestial’ by ‘streams of living water’. Baker is using New Testament imagery to give the psalm a new meaning: the ‘ransom’ is from Matthew 20: 28, and the living water from John 4: 10. A sermon is being deftly interwoven into the text of the psalm: Perverse and foolish oft I stray'd But yet in love he sought me, And on his shoulder gently laid, And home, rejoicing, brought me. This is an expansion of Herbert's ‘Or if I stray, he doth convert’; like a stained-glass window, it pictures the shepherd carrying the lamb, laid gently on the shoulder: the iambic metre beautifully allows the stress on ‘home’ in the last line (as it does on ‘food’ and ‘Cross’ in other verses). The gentle carrying home is taken up by the endearment of ‘dear Lord’ in the next verse; but it is in the following verse that Baker's difference from his predecessors is most obvious: Thou spread'st a table in my sight; Thy unction grace bestoweth; And Oh, what transport of delight From Thy pure chalice floweth! The table has become a communion table, and the cup is a chalice. Psalm 23 has been filtered through the Book of Common Prayer, as well as the New Testament, so that the final address to the ‘Good Shepherd’ (from John 10: 11) suggests church attendance and hymn-singing on earth as well as the hope of heaven: Good Shepherd, may I sing Thy praise Within thy house for ever. Baker's skilful paraphrase points to the most significant difference between nineteenth-century Church hymnody and that which preceded it. In the years after 1861, as James Martineau clearly saw, it came from within the Church: it threw the emphasis on the institution as much as on the individual. It celebrated the services, morning and evening: To Thee our morning hymns ascended, Thy praise shall sanctify our rest. It took up phrases from the Order of Morning Prayer, such as ‘Day by day we magnify Thee’ from the Te Deum:


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Day by day we magnify Thee When, as each new day is born, On our knees at home, we bless Thee For the mercies of the morn. Ellerton's hymns suggest a pattern of life, decorous and fulfilling, continuing on to old age and death: Day by day we magnify Thee, Till our days on earth shall cease, Till we rest from these our labours, Waiting for Thy day in peace. Ellerton is in the Church: the hymns of this period see it as a way of life, with an emphasis on the Church as the book of Christ: One Church, one Faith, one Lord. With the success of supplements and revised editions of Hymns Ancient and Modern, the phrase in the title ‘for use in the Services of the Church’ became a reality. At the same time, as hymns began to be built into the worship of the Church, so the Church became built into the language of hymnody: Lord, her watch Thy Church is keeping; When shall earth Thy rule obey? The Church keeps the watch, waiting for the morning, while the indifferent world goes on its way. Because this was seen as so valuable a mission, it was deeply sensitive to controversy and division: Though with a scornful wonder Men see her sore opprest, By schisms rent asunder, By heresies distrest, Yet Saints their watch are keeping, Their cry goes up, ‘How long?’ And soon the night of weeping Shall be the morn of song. Mid toil and tribulation, And tumult of her war, She waits the consummation Of peace for evermore; This hymn, written on the Bishop Colenso controversy by the Revd S. J. Stone, a London vicar, is the most conspicuous example of the emphasis on the Church: its stamping 7.6.7.6. rhythm, together with S. S. Wesley's heavy and powerful tune AURELIA, made it a formidable example of a strong Anglican hymn (it is said that G. K. Chesterton wrote ‘O God of

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earth and altar’ in the same metre because he thought AURELIA was the ‘typical tune for hymns’). The same metre was used by E. H. Plumptre for ‘Thy hand, O God, has guided’, every verse of which comes to a resounding climax with One church, one faith, one Lord. Each verse precedes the triple statement (with the church first) with the anticipatory word ‘this’, which holds back the final line for maximum effect. Plumptre's hymn is assertive, and excessive in its claims: the ‘One church’ and ‘one faith is presumably the Church of England and its particular form of belief, which stands (as if in close and special relationship) linguistically in parallel to ‘one Lord’. The discovery of hymns, in the Church of England, was followed by a period in which those hymns were used to emphasize the particular glories of the Church: after stealing the Nonconformists' clothes, the Church of England paraded itself with assurance and complacency. The Church's one foundation is, in this reading, Jesus Christ her Lord: and although ‘the church’ could be taken to mean the wider Church of all believers, there is little doubt that for many singers at this time ‘the church’ would have meant the Established Church with the Queen at its head. Susan Drain quotes a poem by John Mason Neale (which is now impossible to read with a straight face after Noel Coward's ‘The stately homes of England’): The good old Church of England! With her priests through all the land, And her twenty thousand churches, How nobly does she stand! Dissenters are like mushrooms, That flourish but a day; Twelve hundred years, through smiles and tears, She hath lasted on alway! The fact that Neale could publish such callow nonsense is evidence of a frame of mind that was reflected in the majestic, proprietorial grandeur of Victorian Church of England hymnody. Controversy was introduced as a recognition of the problems of the time, but always with the promise that these were temporary setbacks. As early as 1834, on the eve of the Oxford Movement, Philip Pusey had written: Lord of our life, and God of our salvation, Star of our night, and hope of every nation, Hear and receive Thy Church's supplication,— The Church was the ark, surrounded by floods: the fort, besieged by ‘Thy Foes’ hurling envenomed darts:


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Grant us Thy help till backward they are driven; Grant them Thy truth, that they may be forgiven; Pusey said that his hymn ‘refers to the state of the Church, assailed from without, enfeebled and distracted from within, but on the eve of a great awakening’.516 The concentration on the Church was inevitable, given the circumstances of the Church of England's new involvement with hymnody: but it led ultimately and insidiously to a religious equivalent of what T. S. Eliot described in another context as a ‘dissociation of sensibility’. In his famous comment on Victorian poetry he suggested that in Tennyson and Browning there was a separation of thought and feeling: in the Anglican hymn-writers of the nineteenth century there was an assumption of the centrality of the Church, and a conviction of its righteousness, that led to a dissociation of sensibility between the Church and the world. This is, at its most serious, a response, defensive and inadequate, to the discoveries of Darwinian science and to the much-feared Tübingen school of German rationalism led by Ferdinand Christian Baur. At its most debased and trivial, it emerges in William Walsham How's letter to the Yorkshire Post, telling the world that he had found Jude the Obscure fit for burning in the episcopal fireplace of Wakefield.517 In How's silly action, his self-righteousness, and his complacent public announcement, the dissociation of sensibility between the Church and the nineteenth century has become a great fissure. The concentration on the Church had another result, part of the consequence of its vivid self-awareness. If it was threatened from without by the secular elements of Victorian society, and in competition with the Nonconformists and the Roman Catholics, it saw itself clearly in the role of the Church militant here on earth, with an emphasis on militant. This accounts for the popularity of ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’ and ‘Soldiers of Christ arise’; the former was published in 1864 and immediately added to Hymns Ancient and Modern in the Appendix of 1868; while the latter was specially brought in to the first edition from the Wesleyan tradition by having a tune written for it by W. H. Monk, ST ETHELWALD. The writing of a new tune was an indication of the importance which the compilers attached to a hymn based on the whole armour of God (Ephesians 6). At the same time, the Church in its militant state looked towards the end of all battles in the final triumph of the ascended Jesus. The nineteenth century saw the rise of the triumph hymn, beginning with the ecstatic and visionary work of Thomas Kelly. Kelly, who was banned from preaching in Dublin

516

H. P. Liddon, Life of Pusey (London, 1893–97), i. 298. Quoted in Hymns Ancient and Modern, Historical Edition (London, 1909), 496.

517

For How's letter, see Frederick Douglas How, Bishop Walsham How (London, 1898), 344. It seems that How wished at one time to set up an Index of proscribed books (which would no doubt have included Hardy's novels). See How, p. 345.

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churches and who set up his own in a number of Irish towns, wrote over seven hundred hymns; but the ones which became popular and remained so were concerned with the Passion and Resurrection: The head that once was crowned with thorns Is crowned with glory now: A royal diadem adorns The mighty Victor's brow. Kelly was very strong in his verses because of his firm use of metre, and his juxtaposition of ‘then’ and ‘now’: the two crowns symbolize the great transition from earth to heaven, and those who suffer in this world will find joy in the next: They suffer with their Lord below, They reign with him above, Their profit and their joy to know The mystery of his love. Below/above: the transition is also a transformation, as the Cross becomes The The The The

balm of life, the cure of woe, measure and the pledge of love, sinner's refuge here below, angels' theme in heaven above.

The balancing of Kelly's verses gives them a remarkable strength, as well as a certain obviousness, two heavy blocks of syntax supporting one another. These structural devices are not subtle but they grip the experience: in Kelly's other triumph hymn, the structure is found in the rhymes: Hark, those bursts of acclamation; Hark, those loud triumphant chords; Jesus takes the highest station: O what joy the sight affords! Crown him! Crown him! King of kings, and Lord of lords! Sometimes Kelly's work becomes nauseatingly triumphalist: Sinners in derision crown'd him, Mocking thus the Saviour's claim;— (where are they now, is the implication). Kelly's less extreme successors were such writers as Godfrey Thring (‘Crown Him with many crowns’) and James Russell Woodford, whose Hymns arranged for the Sundays and Holy Days of the Church of England (1852) contained the translation of ‘Aeterne Rex altissime’:


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Christ, above all glory seated, King eternal, strong to save, To thee death by death defeated Triumph high and glory gave. This is one of a succession of such hymns: another is G. H. Bourne's ‘Lord, enthroned in heavenly splendour, | Firstbegotten from the dead’, published in his Seven Post-Communion Hymns of 1874, and included in the 1889 Supplement to the 1875 edition of Hymns Ancient and Modern. Its tune, ST HELEN, has been described as one of the greatest of Victorian hymn tunes, and its text is full of apocalyptic imagery, beginning with Revelation 1: 5 (‘First-begotten from the dead’) and ending with Revelation 5: 12: Life-imparting, heavenly Manna, Stricken Rock with streaming side, Heaven and earth with loud hosanna Worship thee, the Lamb who died, Alleluia! Alleluia! Risen, ascended, glorified! The splendid images of the first two lines give way to the simplicity that follows, building up again to the three magnificent participles of the final line. The interest in hymns of militancy and triumph was inextricably connected with the rise of hymnody within the Church of England (Woodford became Bishop of Ely, and Bourne the Sub-Dean of Salisbury); an unacknowledged agenda for the hymn-writers for these years was the take-over of a form which had been found effective, and the use of it to promote the superiority of that Church. John Ellerton noted that the use of hymns came to us from an unwelcome source—from the Dissenters, eminently from the Methodists; it was first adopted by those of the clergy who sympathized most with them; for many long years it was that dreaded thing, a ‘party badge’; but it held its ground until wise men of all parties began to recognize its value.518 This resulted in the block-buster Anglican hymns, ‘The Church's one Foundation’, ‘For all the saints’, ‘Thy hand, O God, has guided’, ‘The day thou gavest, Lord, is ended’. They were part of the Anglican response to the nineteenth century, and to the competition that existed in it. The Church, as well as its hymn-books, was subject to the nineteenth-century rage for competition. The legacy is to be seen in churches and chapels in every town and city, competing still for attention. As Arthur Hugh Clough wrote sardonically.

518

‘On some peculiarities in the past history of English hymnody’, in John Ellerton, Being a Collection of his Writings on Hymnody, ed. Henry Housman (London, 1896), 185.

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Thou shalt not covet; but tradition Approves all forms of competition. (‘The Latest Decalogue’) The Church of England sharpened its identity in such an environment, and Hymns Ancient and Modern assisted in that process by its unmistakable character, beginning with Bishop Ken, and structured ‘in the spirit of the English Prayer Book’ (Preface to the 1868 and 1875 editions). It emphasized its authority in the 1875 edition by including (for the first time) the names of authors, with all the panoply of ecclesiastical position and degrees where appropriate—Dean Alford; Bishop of Lincoln (Christopher Wordsworth, DD); Bishop of Ely (J. R. Woodford, DD); Dean Milman; Bishop Mant. It needed to preserve its position of market-leader because the number of hymn-books went up by leaps and bounds after 1861 (Julian's Dictionary of Hymnology suggests 230 between 1862 and 1887).519 Some of them were the work of hymn-writers turned editors, such as Francis Pott's Hymns Fitted to the Order of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments of 1861, J. S. B. Monsell's The Parish Hymnal, after the Order of the Book of Common Prayer of 1873, and Godfrey Thring's The Church of England Hymn Book of 1880, the last-named clearly bidding in its title for adoption as an official book. In addition there were reissues, with supplements, of some older hymn-books, such as The Hymnal Noted (1852 and 1854, enlarged with an Appendix, 1862 and onwards) and E. H. Bickersteth's The Hymnal Companion of 1870. The most important of these, edited by John Ellerton, W. W. How, and Berdmore Compton, was the SPCK Church Hymns of 1871. Its music edition of 1874 bore on the title-page, as if to counter the name ‘Monk’, the name of ‘Arthur Sullivan, Mus. Doc.’. Sir Henry Williams Baker was indignant at what he saw as unfair competition from SPCK, ‘supported as the Society is partly by our own contributions’.520 (He had some justification: a cheap edition of Church Hymns sold for one penny.) The two books existed in uneasy rivalry for a time, although the 1875 revision of Hymns Ancient and Modern began the process by which it drove out the competition. The success of these Church of England books provoked a flurry of activity in the Nonconformist churches. They were conscious that their books were becoming outdated, and that there were rich resources of new Anglican hymnody that should be available to them. The result was a surge of official activity, in which the various church governing bodies sought to exploit the new material. The Baptist Hymnal appeared in 1879; the Congregational

519

John Julian, A Dictionary of Hymnology (London, 1892), 341.

520



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Church Hymnal in 1887; the Wesleyan Wesley's Hymns in 1876 with a tune book in 1877 (a reprint of the 1800 edition of the 1780Collection, with a substantial supplement); The Primitive Methodist Hymnal in 1886; and the United Methodist Church Hymnal in 1889. In most cases the decision to move to a new hymn-book was taken by an Annual Assembly or Conference, clearly mindful of the need to keep abreast of current events in hymnody. The importance of the Church of England example is hard to overemphasize, and by this time Baker's possessiveness had begun to be discounted: the Wesleyan book, for example, acknowledges a long list of permission granters, beginning with ‘The Right Rev. the Lord Bishop of Lincoln; the Very Rev. the Dean of Westminster; the Right Hon. and Rev. the Earl Nelson; the Rev. Sir H. W. Baker, Bart.’, and so on. Similarly the United Methodist book contains twelve hymns by Ellerton, eighteen by J. S. B. Monsell, eleven by Bishop How, fourteen by Godfrey Thring, and two by Newman. ‘The Committee have been glad to avail themselves of the labours of both contemporaries and predecessors’, wrote the Committee responsible for Wesley's Hymns, ‘and accordingly the present volume is enriched by a selection from the works of modern hymnologists as well as from the accumulated treasures of the past.’ This official handling of their hymn-books by the various denominations, oddly, left the Church of England more free than the Free Churches, as Percy Dearmer pointed out: ‘as, one after another, other Churches, some of them Anglican, fell under official control, the Church of England became almost the only body left to do pioneer work’.521 The Church of England hymnologists included John Ellerton, William Walsham How, Francis Pott, Godfrey Thring, William Chatterton Dix, and John Samuel Bewley Monsell. Others such as E. H. Plumptre, Dean of Wells (‘Thine arm, O Lord, in days of old’) and Christopher Wordsworth, Bishop of Lincoln (‘Gracious Spirit, Holy Ghost’) were contributors to the complex richness of Anglicanism at this time. John Ellerton, the finest of them, wrote copiously about hymnody, and had strong views about it. He thought that the state of hymnody of the Church of England was ‘chaotic’,522 presumably because of the number of books that were available (although he had reservations about an official hymn-book). He thought that the best hymns were those which were ‘eminently congregational’, and found a whole swathe of hymns unsuitable for worship: The whole multitude of didactic and hortatory verses, the addresses to sinners and saints, the paraphrases of Scripture prophecies, promises, and warnings, the descriptions of heaven and hell, the elaborate elucidations of the anatomy and

521

Percy Dearmer, Songs of Praise Discussed (London, 1933), p. xxiv.

522

Housman (ed.), John Ellerton . . . Writings on Hymnody, 192.

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pathology of the soul; all these, whatever be their value in the chamber, the study, or the pulpit, ought utterly and for ever to be banished from the choir.523 The point is made clearer by a reference to Heber's ‘Brightest and best of the sons of the morning’ (it was, however, printed in Church Hymns, perhaps at the insistence of How and Compton): What are we to say of Bishop Heber offering to the Church as an Epiphany hymn an imaginary address of the Magi to the Star of Bethlehem? . . . Babies are the objects of a good deal of domestic idolatry, but why should a venerable Church Society invite a whole congregation to sing to a baby in church (SPCK Hymn-Book, new edn., 227)?524 In view of the fact that this baby was the Lord God Almighty, Ellerton's objections would seem to be misplaced here, but he had interesting views about hymnology, if only because he was living in an age in which there were so many hymn-books. In his essays and lectures he gave his attention to matters of principle and practice. He was very clear that there should be certain boundaries: ‘Every feeling . . . which enters into any act of true worship, may fitly find expression in a hymn, But we must fix our limit . . . ’525 Beyond the limit, he thought, was Watts's ‘Mistaken souls! that dream of heaven’ which ‘is not a hymn; there is not a particle of devotion in it. To use it in church would be like reading a tract in place of the liturgy.’526 He believed that there was a line to be drawn also between ‘inward’ hymns and ‘congregational’ hymns (which he much preferred). Charles Wesley's ‘Jesu, lover of my soul’, he thought, stood ‘absolutely upon the line’.527 In the same spirit, he thought that Cowper's ‘O for a closer walk with God’ ought to be ‘rejected altogether from a public hymnal’.528 Ellerton's masterpiece, ‘The day thou gavest’, is notable, therefore, for its clear reference to worship: To Thee our morning hymns ascended. Thy praise shall sanctify our rest. This hymn has already been discussed as an example of good structure: it is also an example of Ellerton's economy and vigour. ‘The permanence of a hymn’, he wrote, ‘depends more upon its vigour than upon any other quality.’529 In addition, hymns should be sincere, simple, and brief, and the diction should be straightforward: ‘even in Hymns Ancient and Modern there are too many verses that, as a friend complained to me not long ago, “begin with the verb and end with the nominative case”.’530

523


524

Ibid. 230.

525

Ibid. 228.

526

Ibid. 234.

527

Ibid. 236.

528

Ibid. 237. The hymn was not included in Church Hymns.

529

Ibid. 240.

530

Ibid. 241.


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Many of Ellerton's most memorable verses, therefore, begin with a strong and simple line: This is the day of light: Let there be light to-day; O Dayspring, rise upon our night, And chase its gloom away. However, the verse depends upon a certain repetition, the ‘light’ of the first line being taken up in the second in a chiasmus: ‘day of light/light to-day’. The double clause—‘rise upon our night/And chase’ is also a form that Ellerton liked to use: Grant us Thy peace upon our homeward way; With Thee began, with Thee shall end, the day: Guard Thou the lips from sin, the hearts from shame, That in this house have called upon Thy name. The first line is arresting in its simplicity, but it is followed by the rhetorical pattern of ‘With Thee . . . with Thee’ and the zeugma of line 3. Such a striking opening, followed by a more complicated syntax, is found in the next verse: Grant us Thy peace, Lord, through the coming night; Turn Thou for us its darkness into light; From harm and danger keep Thy children free, For dark and light are both alike to Thee. The following of simplicity with complexity (analysing the darkness/light contrast in a spiritual sense) is characteristic of Ellerton; so is his closeness to the Book of Common Prayer, here to the third Collect at Evening Prayer, ‘Lighten our darkness, we beseech Thee, O Lord’. The direct lines give Ellerton's hymns their vigour: the complex ones give his hymns their intellectual energy, providing something for the mind to disentangle. A most delicate example is found in his hymn for that rarest of subjects, the Presentation in the Temple: Hail to the lord who comes, Comes to his temple gate, Not with his angel host, Not in his kingly state: No shouts proclaim him nigh, No crowds his coming wait. The mind is deliberately kept in suspense by this series of negatives, which exclude, one by one, the possibilities (not his heavenly temple; not the Palm

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Sunday entry into Jerusalem). Only in the following verse does Ellerton reveal the secret: Christ is still a baby— But borne upon the throne Of Mary's gentle breast Watched by her duteous love, In her fond arms at rest; Thus to his Father's house He comes, the heavenly Guest. The transformations are designed to reinterpret the story ingeniously. Mary's breast is the throne, Christ's earthly throne; and the Christ-child is now a guest in his Father's earthly house, but a heavenly guest. The third verse is an Italian Renaissance painting (Ellerton lived in and near Genoa for a time): There Joseph at her side In reverent wonder stands; And filled with holy joy, Old Simeon in his hands Takes up the promised child, The glory of all lands. As so often in Ellerton, Church worship (in this case the ‘Nunc dimittis’ of Evening Prayer) is at the back of his mind; and one reason why his hymns are held in such affection as well as esteem is their delicate supplementing of formal worship. Another must be his skilful use of Shakespeare. His once very popular funeral hymn is a Christianized version of the supremely touching lament for Fidele in Cymbeline (‘Fear no more the heat o’ the sun'): Now the labourer's task is o'er; Now the battle day is past; Now upon the farther shore Lands the voyager at last. Father in Thy gracious keeping Leave we now Thy servant sleeping. The hymn replaces Shakespeare's haunting and reverberating images with traditional Christian patterns—the battle, the farther shore—but does so with a pace and rhythm that allow for both exposition and prayer: There the tears of earth are dried; There its hidden springs are clear; There the work of life is tried By a juster Judge than here. Father, in Thy gracious keeping Leave we now Thy servant sleeping.

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Ellerton's rigorous insistence that hymns should be congregational here becomes a generalizing that is allowed to narrow down to the individual in the grave, through the compassion which balances the dignity of the hymn. It is that balance which is characteristic of Ellerton's hymns, together with his craftsmanship: it enables him to write hymns that are both noble and churchmanlike, but also sensitive to human feeling. ‘The soul has its Lent, its Easter, its Pentecost’, he wrote;531 and his hymns are vigorous and direct, yet also complex with his awareness of humanity. William Chatterton Dix was a Bristolian, whose parents clearly had hopes that he would be a poet (William after Shakespeare or Wordsworth, Chatterton after ‘the marvellous boy’ who died young). He published a tiny book, Altar Songs, subtitled ‘Verses on the Holy Eucharist’ in 1867, intended ‘for the use of those who believe in, revere and love the Doctrine of the Real Presence’. A Vision of All Saints (1871) is a more ambitious production, with a strong inclination to ritualism. One poem, which is called ‘Ritualism’, is a robust defence of High Church worship against the world, the flesh, and the devil, all of whom attack it: ‘What!’ rails the Flesh, ‘do you really think that the joy of your Heaven will be found In vestments and lights, prostrations and forms, and prayers in a wearisome mound? I have better delights than these for mine, pride of life, and lust of the eyes.’ O Flesh, pride and lust will have no place there, nor the serpent in angel's guise. The poet's final acknowledgment that they all despise ritual is followed by his own private spirituality: Sun, moon, and stars, shine out for me, Earth lays her bounty at my feet; Each moon new forms of grace I see, Each night fresh mysteries I greet. (‘Hid Treasure’) Dix's title, A Vision of All Saints, accurately reflects his fondness for sainthood. In ‘Signs and Wonders by the Name of Jesus’, he lists them (in the manner of D. G. Rossetti in ‘The Blessed Damozel’): I love the names of all the saints, I know their music well, The canticles of those who won, The sighs of those who fell; Peter and John, and blessed Paul, And tearful Magdalene, Teresa, Agnes, Margaret, And Mary, Virgin-Queen.

531


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In the same spirit there are hymns to ‘A group of virgin martyrs (S. Agatha, S. Faith, S. Cecilia)’. This love of ritual was connected with a mystical fervour in Dix's work and gives it a distinctive character. His poem ‘To the Blessed Trinity’, for example, is more complex than Heber's ‘Holy, holy, holy’, with an unusual metre that is basically choriambic but very varied: Thrice Holy God, behold us now confessing Thee, Mystery of mysteries, worthy of praise and blessing: Standing afar we worship Thee, without the Holy Place Where in fullness of Thy Majesty, Archangels see Thy Face. The standing outside the holy place is characteristic of nineteenth-century ritualism, which erected screens between nave and choir to emphasize the importance of the holy mysteries. In the same spirit, Dix has a ritualist's dislike for the mundane and the trivial. He writes at times like some hymn-writing Matthew Arnold, attacking the Benthamite trust in material progress. A poem ironically entitled ‘The Age of Wisdom’ includes ‘worldly-wisdom's addled pate’ which pretends to celebrate such things as hygiene and public health, rationalism and science: Men's well-wrought plans must stay the tide Of evil that sets in: Good Government and British pride The mastery shall win. Be clean, drain well, and baffle death; Yet Death is at the door, And Caution, thwarted, holds her breath Until the plague is o'er. O nineteenth century, how wise, By all thy sons extolled! Spoilt by thy vain philosophies, And science, falsely called. In his unironic mode, Dix wrote serviceable hymns for Epiphany (‘As with gladness men of old’) and for harvest-time (‘To Thee, O Lord, our hearts we raise’), but nothing comes near the magnificence of his hymn for Holy Communion at Ascension-tide: Alleluia, sing to Jesus, His the sceptre, his the throne; Alleluia, his the triumph, His the victory alone: The hymn is, at one level, a triumph hymn, of the kind written by Kelly or Thring; but it is much more than that, because it incorporates a complex set of beliefs, beginning with the Redemption:


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Jesus, out of every nation Hath redeemed us by his blood. The need for faith (‘Faith believes, nor questions how’) is accompanied by a reference to the Ascension: Though the cloud from sight received him, When the forty days were o'er, Shall our hearts forget his promise, ‘I am with you evermore’? What Dix has done is to allude to different passages of scripture in a dense interlocking weave, in a manner that had not been practised since the work of Charles Wesley. In this hymn, Dix—perhaps unconsciously—picks up Wesley's intertextual method and applies it, using the Gospels, the Epistles, and Revelation: Intercessor, friend of sinners, Earth's Redeemer, plead for me, Where the songs of all the sinless Sweep across the crystal sea. The rhetoric of the first verse (‘His the sceptre . . . his the triumph’) gives way to a sudden cry, as though the spirit of Neale was married to the spirit of Toplady; and the hymn then swings into its vision of the crystal sea, from Revelation 4. Dix then brings it back to earth with a final reference to the Holy Communion: Thou on earth both priest and victim, In the eucharistic feast. Jesus is ‘the great high priest’, and the figures of Aaron and Melchisedec are blended with the figure of the crucified Saviour. Dix compresses volumes of systematic theology into the verse-form, and it is that compression which gives the hymn a distinction not seen since the eighteenth century. William Walsham How lacks the compressed theology of Dix, but his hymns are effective because of their orthodoxy. For the first time since Watts, we hear the note of patriotism in hymnody, a note that will become stronger as the nineteenth century draws to a close: O Lord, stretch forth thy mighty hand And guard and bless our fatherland. The images are those of a Church and a nation: The Church of Thy dear Son Inflame with love's pure fire, Bind her once more in one And life and truth inspire:

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The verse is lifeless, but the sentiment irreproachable: it goes hand in hand with Sunday observance and civic virtue, associated with the language of the Book of Common Prayer: O let us love thy house, And sanctify thy day, Bring unto Thee our vows, And loyal homage pay: Give peace, Lord, in our time; O let no foe draw nigh, Nor lawless deed of crime Insult Thy majesty. It is not surprising that How should have been closely associated with the aptly named Church Hymns; nor that one of his most popular works should have been entitled Pastor in Parochia, a book to help in pastoral visitation ‘for general use in ordinary cases of sickness among the uneducated’ (How envisaged another book ‘of the like sort adapted for the educated’) and for ‘Cottage Lectures, Missionary Meetings, etc.’ In the children's section there is How's best-known children's hymn, ‘It is a thing most wonderful’, where he succeeds in getting inside a child's mind better than most: I sometimes think about the Cross, And shut my eyes, and try to see The cruel nails, and crown of thorns, And Jesus crucified for me. How is suggesting a childlike technique that comes touchingly close to meditative practice: he has abandoned his official sonorities for a delicate and tentative moment. More often he is inclined to satisfaction as in Summer suns are glowing Over land and sea, Happy light is flowing Bountiful and free. Everything rejoices In the mellow rays, All earth's thousand voices Swell the psalm of praise. This is too confident to be convincing: that sunshine is unpredictable, and How is better when he sticks to Church doctrine and traditional imagery, as in ‘O Jesu, thou art standing | Outside the fast-closed door’, on the theme of Revelation 3: 20, used so famously by Holman Hunt with his picture ‘The Light of the World’ (exhibited 1854). All How's better qualities, and his weaknesses, come together in the hymn for the Church on All Saints' Day:


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For all the Saints who from their labours rest, Who Thee by faith before the world confest, Thy name, O Jesu, be for ever blest, Alleluia! This is a Church-person's hymn, implying the separation of the Church and the World, before which the saints have confessed their faith. It deals with Apostles, Evangelists, and Martyrs (in three verses which are normally omitted) and with the warfare of the Church militant here on earth, in which, finally, ‘The Saints triumphant rise in bright array’. The ‘finally’ is important, because one feature of this hymn is its length, which is necessary in order to allow the passage from struggle to victory. The hymn satisfies a sense of realism (the earthly fight) and suggests a sublime hope (‘Singing to Father, Son, and Holy Ghost’). As verse succeeds verse, the broad sweep of the stanza form carries the singer along: the triple rhyme is assertive, and the syntax and rhythms both allow the climax of each verse to arrive early in the third line. The two best tunes, Stanford's ENGELBERG and Vaughan Williams's SINE NOMINE, both recognize this, and allow for it. The result is a very splendid hymn, with the kind of imagery of power and battles that Tolkien was later to use in The Lord of the Rings. Whatever the reader thinks about the wisdom of using such apocalyptic imagery, it certainly makes for a rousing imaginative experience, far more than the hymnody of the other Bishop-hymnodist, Christopher Wordsworth, who is pedestrian beside How. At least ‘Summer suns are glowing’ has some freshness in its short lines, whereas Wordsworth's ‘O Lord of heaven, and earth, and sea’ has only the obvious ‘Thy love declare . . . Thou art there’: The golden sunshine, vernal air, Sweet flowers and fruits, Thy love declare: Where harvests ripen, Thou art there, Giver of all. Where God is in bad harvests and food shortages is unclear: but Wordsworth goes on to celebrate a Victorian ideal: For peaceful homes, and healthful days, For all the blessings earth displays, We owe Thee thankfulness and praise, Giver of all! The problem with this, and with all of Wordsworth's hymns, is that there is no theology, only contemplation: See the Conqueror mounts in triumph, See the King in royal state— Because of their failure to articulate any ideas, his hymns end with a ‘Gloria’ verse that seems not to have been worked for:

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Alleluia, alleluia, Glory be to God on high;— Glory be to God the father, Glory be to God the Son— It is not easy to say what is wrong here, except that the lines seem obvious and grandiloquent rather than an expression of the ‘heart-work’ of religion. The Anglican tradition, which is found so finely in Ellerton and Dix, here becomes the prisoner of its own respectability, with a thought that is limited and an expression which is commonplace. Similarly, John Samuel Bewley Monsell is the prisoner of his age in ‘Fight the good fight with all thy might’, which, as Susan Tamke remarks, is full of active images—fighting and running: ‘The language is . . . the language of the public-school boy: competition, fighting, racing, winning prizes.’532 It is not sufficient to reiterate the importance of the Church militant here on earth and the Church triumphant in heaven. In Bishop Wordsworth, the splendour of Anglican hymnody is dimmed: the brief period of greatness, from Lyte through Neale to Ellerton and Dix, was over.

German Hymns One of the best features of Hymns Ancient and Modern was its use of German hymnody, mainly from Catherine Winkworth's translations. Her preface to Lyra Germanica described Germany as ‘the home of Christian poetry’,533 and recognized that German hymnody through the centuries had been majestic, rich, and varied. It cannot have been unknown in Great Britain, but it had had surprisingly little impact on hymnody in English with the exception of John Wesley's translations of German hymns (which Catherine Winkworth knew and admired) taken from the Herrnhut Gesang-Buch of the Moravians. An interest in German philosophy and aesthetic theory was part of the British response to European Romanticism: Coleridge, in particular, was a great transmitter of German ideas, especially those of Schelling (so much so that he has been accused of plagiarism). In Germany itself, the early nineteenth century saw a revival of interest in Luther, under the influence of the German Romantic movement. He became an icon of German national feeling; and his courage and his poetic energy made him an example of inspired individuality. An edition of Luthers Geistliche Lieder was published in Berlin in 1817; Heine's famous description of ‘Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott’ as ‘the Marseillaise Hymn of the Reformation’ shows how effectively

532

Susan S. Tamke, Make a Joyful Noise unto the Lord: Hymns as a Reflection of Victorian Social Attitudes (Athens, Ohio, 1978), p. 63.

533

Catherine Winkworth, ‘Preface’, Lyra Germanica (London, 1855), p. vii.


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Luther and his part in history were becoming part of a distinctive German myth, and how closely that myth was connected with the ideals and hopes of the French Revolution.534 That tendency to engender myths is well seen in Carlyle's translation of ‘Ein feste Burg’ and the essay which accompanied it in Fraser's Magazine in 1831. Carlyle thought that the words ‘probably never before printed in England’ were those of ‘a Man . . . not only permitted to enter the sphere of Poetry, but to dwell in the purest centre thereof ’. He described the hymn as having ‘something in it like the sound of Alpine avalanches, or the first murmur of earthquakes; in the very vastness of which dissonance a higher unison is revealed to us’.535 Carlyle's enthusiasm may have had something to do with his impatience with Catholic Emancipation and with Church squabbling in general; and certainly the vogue for German hymns that followed was encouraged by a need to affirm the principles and practices of the Reformation. Carlyle's imagery of avalanches and earthquakes suggests the power of immense natural forces, as opposed to the artificiality of the man-made pre-Reformation Catholic Church; and one of the qualities in Luther's verse that he managed to capture was that of a direct and rugged challenge to any point of view other than its own. That roughness was for him part of Luther's appeal, just as it would have repelled the tender sensibilities of the Oxford Movement, with their attempts to ‘soothe’ the fever of the age. So Carlyle admired Luther's courage in standing up to Pope and Emperor, and found it reflected in the verse: Mit unsrer Macht ist nichts gethan, Wir sind gar bald verloren: Es streit't für uns der rechte Mann, Den Gott selbst hat erkoren. With force of arms we nothing can, Full soon were we down-ridden; But for us fights the proper Man,— Whom God himself hath bidden. We were ‘down-ridden’: the image comes from cavalry charges, from ancient properties of armed warfare (‘Strong mail of Craft and Power’ is worn by the Prince of Hell), from old-style individual fighting (‘shield and weapon’). The ancient Prince of Hell is strong and violent, and ‘On Earth is not his fellow’. In this battle against the heavyweight champion we are helpless without the aid of Christ; but with him we shall triumph, because he is ‘the proper Man’, a real man. Through him we can have confidence, even though we may lose all the things that we love most:

534

Julian, Dictionary of Hymnology, 323.

535

Thomas Carlyle, ‘Luther's Hymn’, in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (London, 1899), ii. 160–1.

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God's word, for all his craft and force, One moment will not linger, But spite of Hell, shall have its course, 'Tis written by his finger. And though they take our life, Goods, honour, children, wife, Yet is their profit small; These things shall vanish all, The City of God remaineth. By his inversions and suspensions, Carlyle produces a hymnic language (and a deliberately gender-exclusive text) that is highly artificial yet charged with energy: this combines with the martial imagery to produce a hymn that is strangely and unusually awkward and rough-edged, yet all the better for being so. The rhyme scheme, which disconcertingly changes from quatrains to couplets, with an unrhymed line hanging at the end (as in Bunyan's ‘Who would true valour see’, another effectively rough hymn), is also responsible for this sense of deliberate ruggedness, which goes well with Christianity as a type of legendary heroism. Carlyle is seeing the spiritual life in terms of primitive conflict: his verse is a distorted, violent expression of this, combining heavy rhythmical beats with unexpected word-order: Ask ye, Who is this same? Christ Jesus is his name, The Lord Zebaoth's son, He and no other one Shall conquer in the battle. It is this tempered violence of the verse which is so distinctive, capturing something of Luther's original toughness: Nehmen sie uns den Leib, Gut', Ehr', Kind und Weib, Lass fahrennur dahin. Sie haben's kein Gewinn, Das Reich Gottes muss uns bleiben. Even though he takes everything from us, the Prince of Hell, clad in his strong mail of craft and power, has ‘kein Gewinn’, no success, because he has been destroyed by Jesus the warrior, and the City of God remains untaken: a safe stronghold our God is still (the last two words added by Carlyle). Attempts have been made to avoid the pre-feminist words of this text, some of them namby-pamby such as Rupert Davies's in Hymns and Psalms (‘And though before our eyes | All that we dearly prize | They seize beyond recall’). Such lines destroy the integrity of Carlyle's (and Luther's) text, which depends for its effect upon an acknowledgment of the violence of


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conflict in the spiritual life. The psalm on which it is based (Psalm 46) is about power pitted against power, and the hymn was written by a man whom Carlyle considered a hero. It presents Christianity as medieval warfare, a conflict which Carlyle appreciated with his usual uncompromising energy; which is why his rendering has never been surpassed. Luther continued to be a subject of interest, most notably in Richard Massie's Martin Luther's Spiritual Songs, published in 1854. Massie could not resist adding his voice to the principal controversy of the age: ‘For my own part, the longer I live, the more I learn to bless God for the Reformation and the Reformers.’536 Massie saw Luther as less of a warrior than Carlyle, and as more of a popular poet, although his translations were unable to justify his enthusiasm. They are for the most part colourless and flat, and have been deservedly forgotten. However, Massie later turned his attention, with more success, to the nineteenth-century German writer Karl Johann Philipp Spitta, publishing in 1860 (a year after Spitta's death) a collection entitled Lyra Domestica: Christian Songs for Domestic Edification. Translated from the ‘Psaltery and Harp’ of C. J. P. Spitta. The title was one of the many ‘Lyra’ titles which followed Lyra Apostolica; but Massie's object was a special one, the provision of hymns for ‘the domestic circle’. Spitta was indeed suitable for this, as his bestknown hymn, ‘O selig Haus, wo man dich aufgenommen’—‘O happy home where Thou art loved the dearest’, indicates. This was translated not by Massie but by Sarah Laurie Findlater, one of a series of brilliant young women translators of German hymns.537 Another of them was Frances Elizabeth Cox, whose Sacred Hymns from the German appeared in 1841. Cox's hymns were translated from a very influential anthology of over nine hundred hymns by Christian Carl Josias Bunsen, Prussian diplomat and man of letters, and ambassador to the United Kingdom from 1841 to 1854. Bunsen's book, entitled Versuch eines allgemeinen evangelischen Gesang-und Gebetbuchs, published in Hamburg in 1833, was a huge store-house of German hymnody, drawing on many different traditions. Cox followed Carlyle and anticipated Winkworth in attempting ‘a close expression of the style and character of the originals, the metres having been retained, in order to keep up the resemblance as much as possible’.538 The comparison is made easier because in Sacred Hymns from the German the German and English texts are printed opposite one another. Frances Cox described the chief characteristic of the German hymns which she translated as ‘their great simplicity’: she thought that ‘even in

536

Richard Massie, ‘Preface’, Martin Luther's Spiritual Songs (London, 1854), p. xiii.

537

Massie paid tribute to them in the Preface to Lyra Domestica, noting that ‘Miss Winkworth has already culled the choicest flowers from the earliest writers, and transplanted them with so much skill and success into our English soil, that it would be but a discouraging task to follow in her track’ (p. viii).

538

Frances Elizabeth Cox, ‘Preface’, Sacred Hymns from the German (London, 1841), p. viii.

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these days of refinement and laxity, there are still many “true of heart”, who can appreciate pious thoughts clothed in simple verse’.539 Three magnificent translations by Cox have held their own into present-day hymn-books. The first (which appeared in Hymns Ancient and Modern in 1861) is from a hymn by H. T. Schenk, ‘Verklärte Heiligen’ (‘Saints in Glory’): Who are these, like stars appearing, These before God's throne who stand? Each a golden crown is wearing— Who are all this glorious band? Hallelujah, hark! they sing, Praising loud their heavenly King. The last couplet skilfully retains the German metre, and also livens up the line, by inserting the word ‘hark!’, to make the syllabic equivalent of the graceful Hallelujah singen all, Loben Gott mit hohem Schall. Cox retains the basically trochaic metre of the German, and the quatrain followed by a couplet works very effectively: As the hart at noontide panteth For the brooks of water clear, For the life-spring Jesus granteth These have groan'd with many a tear: Now their thirst is satisfied, For they are by Jesus' side. The couplet puts into practice Cox's theory of simplicity, faithfully rendering Nun ihr Durst gestillet ist, Da sie sind bei Jesu Christ. Another hymn in the same metre, which survives in a much altered form, is by Christian Fürchtegott Gellert, the ‘Osterlied’, or Easter song: Jesus lebt, mit ihm auch ich: Tod, wo sind nun deine Schrecken? Gellert is astonishingly simple—‘Jesus lives, and I also with him’—and Cox cannot hope to reproduce that boldness: Jesus lives! no longer now Can thy terrors, Death, appal me: Jesus lives! by this I know,

539

Frances Elizabeth Cox, ‘Preface’, Sacred Hymns from the German (London, 1841), p. viii.


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From the dead he will recall me; Brighter scenes will then commence; This shall be my confidence. The last couplet, which offers variations on Gellert's ‘Diess ist meine Zuversicht’ at the end of every verse, is usually omitted, to make a four-line verse followed by ‘Hallelujah!’. Cox's original translation is certainly uneven, and she is more successful with ‘Sing praise to God who reigns above’. The chief joy of this hymn is its adaptation of the English words to the German metre, and particularly to the two-syllable rhyme: The Lord is never far away, But, through all grief distressing, An ever present help and stay, Our peace, and joy, and blessing; As with a mother's tender hand, He leads His own, His chosen band: To God all praise and glory. The confident movement of the first quatrain is nicely varied by the two eight-syllabled lines that follow, and the double-syllabled ending is well suited to the final ‘glory’. What is even more remarkable, perhaps, is the image of God as a mother, which anticipates much later attempts to evoke a feminine God. Bunsen's great book was the primary inspiration for the greatest of all translators of German hymns, Catherine Winkworth. She learned German in Manchester, where she was encouraged in her intellectual pursuits by the flourishing Unitarian circle around Manchester New College, people such as John James Tayler, James Martineau, and William and Elizabeth Gaskell; although she remained a member of the Church of England. She spent a year in Dresden from 1845 to 1846, when she was 16, perfecting her spoken German, and, like her sister Susanna, was well equipped to translate into English. Susanna was persuaded by Bunsen to undertake the translation of some German mystical prose: her Theologia Germanica appeared in 1854. Catherine's Lyra Germanica of 1855 was, in its title, a graceful compliment, and complement, to her sister's work. Bunsen's book reaches back to the Middle Ages and the Bohemian brethren, and continues through Luther and Paul Gerhardt to writers still living in 1833. In addition to the hymns, which occupy the main part of the book, there are prayers for different occasions, and scholarly information of many different kinds—biographies of the writers, indexes, three appendixes, a long preface—the whole adding up to a total of over 1,100 pages. Turning over the doublecolumned gothic-lettered pages, it is easy to imagine a religious-minded and high-principled young woman, an example of the best of Manchester intellectual life, being fascinated by the immense

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riches of German religious poetry. Lyra Germanica was a result of that fascination, and a testimony to Winkworth's youthful enthusiasm and confidence: it is easy to forget that she was only 27 when the book was published. The preface emphasized, as Frances Elizabeth Cox had done, the connection between German hymnody and the Reformation. Luther, in particular, was seen as a key figure, translating Latin hymns and verses into German while retaining the old tunes, ‘thus enriching the people, to whom he had already given the Holy Scriptures in their own language, with a treasure of sacred poetry which is the precious inheritance of every Christian Church’.540 As Luther with the Latin writers, so Winkworth with Luther: her translations made available that which was formerly unknown, except to German speakers. And since Luther was the great hero of the Reformation, making his work available in English was a contribution to the Protestant cause. Her position is made very clear in a letter to Edward Herford in which she argues that ‘nothing can supersede that inner sense of right and wrong, which I believe to be the voice of the Holy Spirit in the heart’.541 Luther was important historically, but also in aesthetic terms, for he stood (for Cox and Winkworth) in direct opposition to the reserve and delicacy of the Oxford Movement. ‘Luther's hymns’, wrote Winkworth, ‘are wanting in harmony and correctness of metre to a degree which often makes them jarring to our modern ears, but they are always full of fire and strength, of clear Christian faith, and brave joyful trust in God.’542 The preface to Lyra Germanica described Paul Gerhardt as the greatest of all German hymn-writers,543 and paid tribute to John Wesley as a translator. It also contained some justification of Winkworth's technique: the original form has been retained, with the exception, that single rhymes are generally substituted for the double rhymes which the structure of the language renders so common in German poetry, but which become cloying to an English ear when constantly repeated; and that English double common or short metre is used instead of what may be called the German common metre, the same that we call Gay's stanza, to which it approximates closely in the number of syllables, while its associations in our minds are somewhat more solemn.544 Winkworth's attention to the ear, which is noticeable here and in her comments on Luther, led to a significant departure from Cox, who tended

540

Winkworth, Lyra Germanica, p. viii.

541

Margaret J. Shaen, Memorials of Two Sisters, Susanna and Catherine Winkworth (London, 1908), 175.

542

Winkworth, Lyra Germanica, p. ix.

543

She described Gerhardt as ‘the typical poet of the Lutheran Church, as Herbert is of the English’ in her later study of German hymn-writers, Christian Singers of Germany (London, 1869), 202.

544

Winkworth, Lyra Germanica, pp. xiv–xv.


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to follow the German trochaic stress. Winkworth's preference for the iambic released her, and gave her verse a simplicity that she strove for and greatly valued. She spoke of the need for a hymn to be ‘popular and homelike’ in a letter to Richard Massie (the translator of Luther and Spitta, which is perhaps why she emphasized the ‘homelike’): a hymn that sounds popular and homelike in its own language must sound so in ours if it is to be really available for devotional purposes, and it seems to me allowable for this object to make such alterations in the metre, as lie in the different nature of the language.545 The attempt to make something which is popular and homelike in one language seem equally so in another is very difficult; yet that is what Winkworth set out to do. At the same time, she retained, as nearly as possible, the diction, metre, and tone of the original. In the Christmas hymn written by Luther for his son Hans, for example, can be seen the effect of a rhyming octosyllabic couplet, which allows the simplicity to emerge: From heaven above to earth I come To bear good news to every home; Glad tidings of great joy I bring, Whereof I now will say and sing: At first sight, this last line seems to be padded out, but it is very close to Luther's ‘Davon ich singn und sagen will’; and Winkworth succeeds in producing a very tender and delicate Christmas hymn, even though it does not quite catch the tone of the original. Even she was unable to reproduce the attractive endearment of ‘Jesulein’ in a verse which becomes more formal than Luther's: Give heed, my heart, lift up thine eyes! Who is it in yon manger lies? Who is this child so young and fair? The blessed Christ-child lieth there. Merk auf, mein Herz, und sieh dorthin, Was liegt dort in dem Krippelein? Wes ist das schöne Kindelein? Es ist das liebe Jesulein! What Luther has here, and what cannot be reproduced, is the delicate tone, the rough-edged powerful man talking tenderly to his little son; although the English translation comes very close to the original in a later verse: Ah dearest Jesus, Holy Child, Make Thee a bed, soft, undefiled, Within my heart, that it may be A quiet chamber kept for thee.

545

Shaen, Memorials of Two Sisters, 181.

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Luther's other hymns in Lyra Germanica also follow the originals closely: the translation of his version of Psalm 130 has a wonderful simplicity of straightforward expression, which is picked up from the sturdy original: Out of the depths I cry to Thee, Lord God! oh hear my prayer! Incline a gracious ear to me, And bid me not despair: If thou rememberest each misdeed, If each should have his rightful meed, Lord, who shall stand before Thee? Aus tiefer Noth schrei ich zu dir, Herr Gott, erhör mein Rufen; Dein gnädig Ohren kehr zu mir Und meiner Bitt sie öffen: Denn so du willst das sehen an, Was Sünd und Unrecht ist gethan Wer kann, Herr, vor dir bleiben? Winkworth's ‘rightful meed’ sounds artificial, but in other respects the verse works well, partly because the double rhymes of the first four lines have been abandoned for single ones. The last unrhymed line, on the other hand, keeps the two syllables at the end to give (in English) a slight surprise: Up to his care myself I yield, He is my tower, my rock, my shield, And for his help I tarry. In the translation of other writers, Winkworth's delight in simplicity emerges in her straightforward syntax, as in ‘Leave God to order all thy ways’, from Georg Neumark's ‘Wer nur den lieben Gott lässt walten’: Leave God to order all thy ways, And hope in him whate'er betide where the imperatives at the beginning of each line are very strong. In other hymns, the simplicity allows other effects to emerge, as in Paul Gerhardt's evening hymn ‘Nun ruhen alle Wälder’, which contrasts sleeping nature and the waking heart (a frequent idea, but seldom so beautifully expressed): Now all the woods are sleeping, And night and stillness creeping O'er field and city, man and beast; But thou, my heart, awake thee, To prayer awhile betake thee, And praise thy Maker ere thou rest. The word ‘creeping’ here is wonderfully vivid, the German double rhyme turned to advantage as night and stillness gradually move across the earth.


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Another memorable description of night is found in the hymn by Matthäus Claudius, which (as Peter Skrine has perceptively observed) ‘captures much of the poem's Caspar David Friedrich-like sense of nocturnal stillness, and does so even though its lines are one syllable shorter’.546 The moon hath risen on high, And in the clear dark sky The golden stars all brightly glow; And black and hush'd the woods, While o'er the fields and floods The white mists hover to and fro. Lyra Germanica follows Bunsen's anthology in its arrangement of the material in a sequence for the Church year, Sunday by Sunday, with some hymns for saints' days, and other categories such as morning and evening hymns, those for the sick and dying, and funeral hymns. Lyra Germanica: Second Series (1858) is subtitled ‘The Christian Life’ and arranged rather differently, in two parts. The first, ‘Aids of the Church’, includes ‘Holy Seasons’ and ‘Services’; the second is entitled ‘The Inner Life’ (of penitence, praise, faith, the Cross, conflict, and heaven). It shows Winkworth's increasing confidence, found in the sweeping line of Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, the King of Creation; O my soul, praise him, for he is thy health and salvation which echoes in pause and rhythm, Joachim Neander's Lobe den Herren, den mächtigen König der Ehren, Meine geliebete Seele, das ist mein Begehren and which can be sung to the same tune, Neander's ‘Lobe den Herren’. The rhythm of that tune is so strong that it carries the long lines, and then gives force to the short ones, so that the last verse gives a tremendous energy to the rhyme— Let the Amen Sound from his people again: This use of long and short lines, following the German originals with their chiming rhymes, is a feature of Winkworth's art: All my heart this night rejoices, As I hear, Far and near, Sweetest angel voices;

546

Peter Skrine, Susanna and Catherine Winkworth: Clifton, Manchester and the German Connection (Croydon, The Hymn Society, 1992), 9.

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‘Christ is born’, their choirs are singing, Till the air Everywhere Now with joy is ringing. This is somewhat freer with Gerhardt's original than Winkworth would have dared in the first Lyra Germanica. At other times, she remains very close to the original, whenever the opportunity presents itself: Light of light enlighten me Now anew the day is dawning; Sun of grace, the shadows flee,— Licht von Licht, erleuchte mich Bei dem frühen Tageslichte, Gnadensonne, stelle dich When this close correspondence occurs, it gives the hymn a remarkable sense of authority that makes it instantly convincing. The assured and confident rhythms of Martin Rinckart's hymn show what can be done: Nun danket alle Gott Mit Herzen, Mund, und Händen, The German order of words in the first line suits Winkworth's predilection for imperatives (as in ‘Leave God to order all thy ways’): Now thank we all our God, With heart and hands and voices, Who wondrous things hath done, In Whom his world rejoices; the German double rhymes are retained here, as in the original, changing to single ones in the second half of the verse (Winkworth follows Rinckart in rhyming on the alternate lines only): Who from our mother's arms Hath blessed us on our way With countless gifts of love, And still is ours to-day. The confidence is sustained to the end by both writers: Rinckart by the placing of three-syllable words such as ‘dreimaleinen’ (three in one) to give stability to the line: Dem dreimaleinen Gott, Als der ursprünglich war Und ist und bleiben wird Jetzund und immerdar. The One eternal God Whom earth and heaven adore,


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For thus it was, is now, And shall be ever more! This hymn, ‘The Chorus of God's Thankful Children’, appeared in the first edition of Hymns Ancient and Modern of 1861, and is evidence of how quickly Winkworth's hymns began to spread through nineteenth-century hymn-books. Its title suggests a children's hymn, and so does ‘Who from our mother's arms’; it is beautifully calculated for older children (and adults, who can see themselves as children of God). The two volumes of Lyra Germanica began to be used by the compilers of hymn-books, which gave Catherine Winkworth much pleasure; the next step was to unite them with their tunes. At the end of the preface to Lyra Germanica: Second Series she promised such a book, and with the help of two distinguished musicians, William Sterndale Bennett and Otto Gold-schmidt, The Chorale Book for England appeared in 1863. In the Preface she suggested that Lyra Germanica had been intended primarily as a book of private devotion, whereas The Chorale Book for England was for Church worship. She thought that there were some difficulties attendant on the use of these hymns, principally ‘the great length of many of them, and the peculiarity of their metres involving the constant use of disyllable rhymes’. In spite of these problems, she thought the fact that ‘these hymns and tunes first sprang up on a foreign soil’ was no reason ‘why they should not take root among us’.547 In The Chorale Book for England, therefore, are German tunes to many of the greatest German hymns. The editors included one non-German hymn and tune only, from Ravenscroft's 1621 Book of Psalms (possibly of Scottish origin). The remainder are all German, and an index with historical notes gives the source of each one. They have no names, but they include such magnificent tunes as ‘Luther's Hymn’ (now sung to ‘We come unto our fathers' God’), Georg Neumark's tune to ‘If thou but suffer God to guide thee’, and many tunes from Johann Crüger's Gesangbuch Augsburgischer Confession, printed in Berlin in 1640. Crüger's own tune to ‘Nun danket alle Gott’ is there, and Neander's tune to ‘Meine Hoffnung stehet feste’, translated by Winkworth as ‘All my hope is grounded surely’ (later more freely translated by Robert Bridges). There is Neander's ‘Lobe den Herren’, and his swinging tune to ‘Open thou Thy gates in beauty’, now called ‘Neander’ and sung to Neale's ‘Come, ye faithful, raise the anthem’. Others include Philipp Nicolai's tune to ‘How brightly beams the morning star’, Bach's tune (now called ‘Lüneburg’) to ‘Light of light, enlighten me’, and J. G. Ebeling's tune (now called ‘Bonn’) to ‘All my heart this night rejoices’. Winkworth adapted her translations to fit the tunes. At one point, she returned to the German rhythm with its disyllabic rhymes, to fit a tune to ‘Aus tiefer Noth’ from the Geistliches Gesangbuch of 1524:

547

‘Preface’, The Chorale Book for England (2nd edn., London, 1865), p. vii.

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Out of the depths I cry to Thee, Lord, hear me I implore Thee! Bend down Thy gracious ear to me, Let my prayer come before Thee! If Thou rememb'rest each misdeed, If each should have its rightful meed, Who may abide Thy presence? The original ‘Lord, who shall stand before Thee?’ has had to be abandoned because the rhyme has already been used. Later in the same hymn, ‘And for his help I tarry’ becomes ‘His help I wait with patience’, which is less ‘homelike’; it suggests that Winkworth had doubts about a congregation singing the word ‘tarry’ at the end of the verse. The two hundred hymns, ending with ‘Wake, awake’ to Philipp Nicolai's great tune, were followed by an appendix and some historical notes, making the book a very useful introduction to the repertoire of German hymnody. It provided a life-enriching addition to nineteenth-century English hymnody: the mixture of piety and force, the strong biblical base, and the mystical and inspired strain, gave English readers and singers new opportunities, and raised standards. The Literary Churchman noted that ‘they need a degree of executive skill which will not be found in parish churches as a rule’, and the Saturday Review thought that ‘many of the tunes are as beautiful as they are new to the English ear’. The Daily News described the book as containing a body of ecclesiastical harmony which, in antique and venerable grandeur, plain and simple style, freedom from chromatic crudities, and fitness to be sung by large numbers of voices, is unequalled by any work of this class that has appeared in England.548 Such extravagant praise was perhaps a dig at current hymn-books and their tunes (perhaps those of Dykes and Monk: it is instructive to compare the elaborate writing for the alto, tenor, and bass parts of ‘Nun danket’ in Hymns Ancient and Modern with the simple chords in The Chorale Book for England); but its justification is seen in the number of hymns and tunes that were plundered from The Chorale Book to enrich later hymn-books. Indeed, at one point it made a bid to dominate English hymnody, rather than adding to it. The success of the first edition persuaded the editors to add a Supplement to the edition of 1865 ‘to meet a want felt by clergymen, who wish to introduce the Chorale Book for England into their churches; but are justly unwilling to deprive their congregations of the hymns and tunes to which they have been long accustomed’.549 The publishers must have thought they had spotted a marketing opportunity: the addition of a Supplement

548

‘Opinions of the Press’, printed in the second edition of The Chorale Book.

549

‘Advertisement’ to the Supplement (2nd edn., London, 1865).


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was a bold attempt to promote The Chorale Book for England as a major hymn-book, a hymn-book (as its title implies) ‘for England’, and not just an additional body of hymns from German sources. If it did not succeed, it was bad luck and bad timing, for it coincided with the first flush of enthusiasm for Hymns Ancient and Modern, and fell victim to the ruthless entrepreneurship of Sir Henry Williams Baker; but even if it did not become widely adopted, its hymns have made a permanent contribution to the English tradition. Its failure to succeed, in spite of its excellence, is a further testimony to the power of Hymns Ancient and Modern.

16 Victorian Women Hymn-Writers They also serve who patiently But fold their hands, and wait. (Anna Montague) Studies of the great nineteenth-century women novelists, such as Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot, have long recognized that a woman writer was faced with severe problems in the Victorian age. Southey's reply to Charlotte Brontë—‘Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life, and it ought not to be’550—is only one, particularly unpleasant, example of the tendency to exclude the woman's voice in a patriarchal society. Some women attempted to circumvent this by publishing anonymously (Gaskell), or by adopting male pseudonyms (the Brontës, George Eliot). Others chose to publish openly, but in acceptable ways. As Gilbert and Gubar have put it: If she did not suppress her work entirely or publish it pseudonymously or anonymously, she could modestly confess her female ‘limitations’ and concentrate on the ‘lesser’ subjects reserved for ladies as becoming to their inferior powers.551 This is exactly what is found in the work of women hymn-writers. They wrote hymns because it was a respectable and ladylike thing to do, along with teaching in the Sunday school or Bible class (Hardy's Mercy Chant, in Tess of the D'Urbervilles, is an example). Their great exemplar, from the previous century, was Anne Steele, who did not publish under her own name, but who called herself ‘Theodosia’ to indicate her sex. A nineteenth-century writer described her thus: Anne Steele, both on account of an accident in girlhood and heavy attacks of illness at not infrequent intervals, loved the retirement of her Hampshire home. A quiet life suited her best. The garish foppery of fashion and the loud-voiced frequenters of life's dusty arena were little suited to her taste.552

550

E. C. Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, ch. 8 (Thornton edn., 1901, p. 139).

551

Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan M. Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven and London, 1979), 64.

552

Mrs E. R. Pitman, Lady Hymn-Writers (London, 1892), 69. The title is reminiscent of George Eliot's essay ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’, the difference being that George Eliot was using the word ‘lady’ disparagingly and with a sense of irony. The word ‘Mrs’ appears on the title-page and cover of Pitman's book.

VICTORIAN WOMEN HYMN-WRITERS

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The writer of this account, Mrs E. R. Pitman, clearly had a conception of a woman's role as quiet (perhaps in more than one sense). Her book, Lady Hymn-Writers, published in 1892, is full of appreciations of a particular kind, unspoken assumptions about the way in which women (or rather ‘ladies’) were supposed to write. Elizabeth C. Clephane's ‘There were ninety and nine that safely lay’ is described as ‘like most of the hymns that come from the heart of woman—tender, touching, and true’.553 The woman's voice has its place, often a subordinate one, in which she is humble and lowly: Timorous and sad, I durst not plead, Did not Thy word this hope impart, That Christ Himself will intercede And crown the wishes of my heart. When pain and sorrow bring me low, And naught on earth delight can give, Thy sweetest comforts then bestow, Bid hope and faith in vigour live. This hymn, ‘Great God, before Thy throne I bow’, by a ‘Mrs Ainslie’, is found in Josiah Conder's The Congregational Hymn Book of 1836, a book which was unusually generous, for its time, in the space allowed to women writers. In this hymn we see the way in which the subordinate status of women, their timidity, sadness, pain, and sorrow, are transmuted into the appropriate religious posture of humility and dependence. In another hymn in the collection, Conder's wife (Joan Elizabeth, but known always in the book as ‘Mrs Conder’) appropriates the story of the woman in the Gospels as a prototype of female experience: Not Thy garment's hem alone, My trembling faith would hold, Though Divine compassion shone Beneath its sacred fold. Thou didst own her mute appeal, Who besought Thy power to heal. The ‘mute appeal’ stands significantly for all those women without a voice. In another hymn, on Mary Magdalen, Joan Conder writes: When Mary to the Heavenly Guest Her duteous offering made, And, faith's allegiance to attest, Her weeping homage paid;

553

Ibid. 162.

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The heavy drops, distinctly traced On his untended feet, Soon every stain of toil effaced, And gave him welcome meet. She with a veil of folding hair The braided woof supplied, And ministered with gentlest care The rites His host denied. The woman ministers to the man's needs, after his ‘toil’; her care supplies the failure of the male host, with her gentleness and tenderness. One chapter in Mrs Pitman's book, entitled Hymn-Writers for the Quiet Hour’, begins with women hymn-writers who ‘write for the most part for sick and suffering ones, for sad and weary workers, for heart-broken penitents, and for bereaved, trembling mourners’: In all their poetry may be found touches of pathos, evidently wrung from the heart's deepest experiences, scraps of spiritual autobiography, and many snatches of ‘songs in the night’.554 The tenderness, which women hymn-writers were thought to feel to a greater degree than men, was often associated with their own experience of suffering. Indeed, Gilbert and Gubar's observation that in the nineteenth century women were leading lives that caused them to be ill, and that ‘nineteenth-century culture seems to have actually admonished women to be ill’,555 is strikingly borne out in Mrs Pitman's pages. Anne and Emily Brontë died young; Frances Ridley Havergal ‘had many sharp attacks of illness, and consequent journeys in search of health’:556 Eliza Fanny Goffe ‘spent her girlhood amid country surroundings, on account of her delicate health’;557 Margaret Miller Davidson showed early signs of genius which ‘was allied to a fragility of constitution and delicacy of temperament which resulted in early death’;558 Caroline M. Noel ‘suffered a long illness of twenty years before the end came, and thus she “learned in suffering what she taught in song” ’.559 One's heart aches for these women, lost in a twilight world of sick-rooms and weary days: Mrs Pitman herself recalled meeting Adeline Sergeant: The writer met Mrs Sergeant at Weston-super-Mare in 1867, and was much struck by her worn yet refined countenance—worn by long consumptive sufferings. At that time she wrote but little, being almost too feeble; yet that the light of genius still

554

Mrs E. R. Pitman, Lady Hymn-Writers (London, 1892), 246.

555

Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, 54.

556

Pitman, Lady Hymn-Writers, 74.

557

Ibid. 176.

558

Ibid. 210–11.

559

Ibid. 253.


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burned in the wasted frame, it was only too apparent. The writer was then very young both in life-experience and authorship, but she can recall perfectly the sainted halo and atmosphere of ‘quiet confidence’ which hung about this good woman's presence.560 A similar example is that of Charlotte Elliott, who wrote ‘Just as I am, without one plea’, which was first published in The Invalid's Hymn Book (second edition, Dublin 1841). She also published Hours of Sorrow Cheered and Comforted (1836), described on the title-page as being ‘By a Lady’. After a severe illness in 1821, she became an invalid for the next fifty years, devoting some of the time to editing The Christian Remembrancer Pocket Book, and living with her clergyman brother. Her poem ‘The Minstrel’ suggests that the idea of a certain kind of woman poet was acceptable: the minstrel is a woman (as opposed to those in James Beattie's The Minstrel and in Scott's Lay of the Last Minstrel) who is prone to considerable mood-swings: ever and anon I heard her sigh, And ever and anon tears filled her eye. The woman minstrel's voice is soft and low; it is deeply sensitive to sadness, but also deeply moved by the consolations of religion: The sunshine is from earth removed, that heaven more bright may seem, The heart denied what most it loved, till there He reign supreme. Women writers were thought to be especially sensitive to pain, suffering, and the misery of bereavement. A stranger wrote to Anna Laetitia Waring in 1856: I have a great desire to let you know what a source of comfort you ‘Hymns and Meditations’ have been and still continue to be to me, during long dark nights of affliction, and praise God that He has so instructed you, and feel the deepest communion of spirit with you. In the short space of six and a half years I have buried four sons and my dear wife.561 Such sensitivity was thought to be more appropriate than hard thinking. The memoir of Anna Laetitia Waring from which this is taken emphasizes experience and intuition rather than intellectual enquiry: ‘The language of philosophy was alien to her. Speculation on ultimate realities had no attraction for her.’562 Because she lived to a great age, dying in 1910, Waring had to realize that there was such a thing as doubt: ‘The questionings of modern doubt must have reached her outward ears. She never heard an echo of their whisper within; . . . ’563

560

Ibid. 200.

561

Mary S. Talbot, In Remembrance of Anna Laetitia Waring (London, 1911), 29.

562

Ibid. 11.

563

Ibid. 15.

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It is this pattern of tender feelings allied to untroubled minds that characterizes many women hymn-writers of the nineteenth century. They worked within the expected limitations of the age: they wrote hymns for the sick, or for the sad and sorrowing. They also wrote hymns for children, or compiled selections for them, such as Frances Mary Yonge's A Child's Christian Year (1841), with a rather stiff preface by Keble,564 and the more successful Hymns for Little Children (1848) by Cecil Frances Humphreys (later ‘Mrs Alexander’). These were only two of a great number of women hymn-writers for children, beginning with Ann and Jane Taylor's Hymns for Infant Minds (1809), and continuing with many others—Jemima Luke, Mary Duncan, Emily Elliott, Jane Leeson. ‘Women’, wrote Mrs Pitman, —and especially women who were mothers—have excelled in the art of writing hymns for children. Somehow it needs mother-love to interpret divine love to the little ones.565 The parameters of women's hymn-writing seem fairly generally established in these patterns of sensitivity to suffering and anxiety for the well-being of little children; above all, in the acceptance of a subordinate role, in which the woman ‘waits’ rather than works (which is the preserve of the man). A hymn by Anna Montague, called ‘Women’, sets it out clearly. The woman stands by the master's vineyard, longing to go in and work; as she turns to enter, she meets the ‘Master’, who tells her ‘Daughter, I know thy longing heart, In the toil of my laden vineyard, Is eager to bear a part. ‘But from thee no active labour Thy Master's cause demands; Within thy cottage doorway Only sit with folded hands, ‘And the patient endurance of sorrow, And a burden sore of pain, Till I come with a welcome summons To bring thee eternal gain.’

564

Keble's preface is a dry and severe piece. He speaks of the contents as having ‘the air and manner’ which ‘may perhaps be found not ill-calculated gradually to raise and purify the standard by which the poor judge of religious poetry. The word Hymn, in their minds, has been too long associated with productions both in doctrine and manner very unworthy of that sacred name.’ In 1846 Keble produced his own collection, Lyra Innocentium, subtitled ‘Thoughts in Verse on Christian Children, their Ways and their Privileges’. It was this book which Newman reviewed so disingenuously, claiming that the Roman Catholic Church was the church of religion and poetry, and urging Keble to join it. This is the essay referred to at n. 42 of Ch. 12.

565

Pitman, Lady Hymn-Writers, 281–2.


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So he led me to my cottage, And left me within the door so that the hymn ends by adapting Milton for the condition of women— They also serve who patiently But fold their hands, and wait. In the face of such submission it is clear why active and intelligent women like Susanna and Catherine Winkworth campaigned so hard for the higher education of women. They were exceptional among hymn-writers in doing so: the majority accepted their submissive role, sublimating it into the loss of self that religion demanded: they described Jesus, again and again, as ‘Master’. They became expert at describing pain and suffering, the impotence of having to sit with folded hands; they poured out their frustrations in passionate avowals of love to the Saviour (‘Nearer, my God, to Thee’; ‘Draw me nearer, nearer, nearer, precious Lord’); and, more safely, they wrote hymns for children, combining their own memories of childhood, before the conditions of Victorian society and marriage closed in upon them, with their ideas of how children should behave.

Charlotte Elliott; Sarah Flower Adams Charlotte Elliott is chiefly known as the author of ‘Just as I am, without one plea’, but in her own time her poems were exceedingly popular. Her Morning and Evening Hymns for a Week, ‘by a Lady’, privately printed in 1839 and first published in 1842, had reached its thirty-first thousand by 1859 and its fortieth thousand by 1870; and Hours of Sorrow Cheered and Comforted, first published in 1836, went into a seventh edition by 1871. Both books contain a substantial number of unmemorable verses, but a few are remarkable. In Hymns for a Week the Wednesday morning hymn is ‘Christian! seek not yet repose;’ Hear thy guardian angel say Thou art in the midst of foes— ‘Watch and pray!’ Principalities and powers, Mustering their unseen array, Wait for thy unguarded hours— ‘Watch and pray!’ The device of a short fourth line, repeating the phrase to which the first three lines lead, is common in Elliott's work, occurring frequently in Hours of Sorrow. That book was written, according to the first poem, ‘To the Reader’, for the sorrowful—those who ‘feel life's path a rough and thorny way’:

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Not for the gay and thoughtless do I weave These plaintive strains; The poems are full of sympathy for the suffering, who appear in various forms: ‘To a Mourner’; ‘Stanzas for a Friend in Sorrow’; ‘Rest for the Weary’; ‘To an Aged Christian on his Birth-Day’; ‘To one Restless and Unhappy’. There are poems about death-beds, on the deaths of children: one poem is written ‘for one not likely to recover’, and others are concerned with bereavement—‘To a Mother, on the Death of a Child of great promise’; ‘To a Mother bereaved of her only Daughter’. Elliott was interested in all forms of sadness: infant mortality, disease, excess of grief, and physical pain. An unusual one is deafness, which is the subject of two poems, ‘To one suffering from Deafness’, and ‘To one deprived of hearing at Church by Deafness'. The argument of the first is that the loss of one sense will lead the sufferer to rely on another, the eye, and the end result will be a stronger faith: If on thy Saviour rests thine eye, The loss of sense faith's gain will be; For it will closer draw the tie ’Twixt him and thee. It is in the context of this hymnody of affliction that ‘Just as I am’ was written, on the text ‘Him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out (John vi. 37)’. It proved an immensely popular hymn: it was published separately, with illustrations and an exposition, and included in innumerable hymn-books. Its power lies in the repetition of the initial phrase, and the simplicity of those words, ‘Just as I am’, with their craving for acceptance, followed by the fulfilment, ‘O Lamb of God, I come!’ It is the ancestor of many Victorian hymns in which the sinner is accepted, and ends up safe in the arms of Jesus: it is unusual in its ability to capture the movement of such a process so vividly and rhythmically—from the initial nakedness of ‘Just as I am’ to the climax of ‘O Lamb of God, I come!’. The hymn represents a longing that turns into an ecstasy; although I imagine that any conscious sexuality was far from Charlotte Elliott's mind, the unconscious drive towards the Saviour represents a sexual sublimation of the highest order. Between the first phrase and the last in each verse, a parenthesis is developed, exquisitely and pleasurably delaying the hoped-for moment, and allowing the mind to dwell on the power of Jesus to accept and save. These parentheses begin with the saving blood—‘But that thy blood was shed for me’—and continue with the problems of human life— With many a conflict, many a doubt, Fightings and fears, within, without— and end, appropriately, with a contemplation of divine love:


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—of that free love ‘The breadth, length, depth, and height’ to prove, Here for a season, then above The pauses in the rhythm, the structures of the lines, are beautifully calculated, the mind poised at the end of the third line before being released into the joy of ‘O Lamb of God, I come!’ The process of coming to Jesus, repeated in verse after verse, ends in the triumphant final coming, the release from loss and pain, and the mystic's joy and wonder, safe in the everlasting arms. It is as passionate a representation of divine love, and human response, as Bernini's Saint Teresa, caught in her moment of ecstasy. Sarah Flower Adams (who does not appear in Mrs Pitman's book, perhaps because she was a Unitarian) is another of the women hymn-writers who suffered from poor health: she had to give up a career on the stage because of illness, and she died aged 43. Her hymns were first printed in one of the many Unitarian collections for local use, in this case for the congregation of the celebrated W. J. Fox at South Place, Finsbury (Hymns and Anthems, 1841). Her best-known hymn parallels Elliott's work in its acknowledgment of suffering: Nearer, my God, to Thee, Nearer to Thee! E'en though it be a cross That raiseth me, The cross is the journey through life, with all its hardships: Adams likens it to Jacob's journey, when he used stones for a pillow (Genesis 28: 11), and saw the ladder in a dream: Though, like the wanderer, The sun gone down, Darkness be over me, My rest a stone, Yet in my dreams I'd be Nearer, my God to Thee, Nearer to Thee! The rich story of Jacob is given a new interpretation, one which cleverly includes all those who feel life as surrounding darkness and lack of shelter. Similarly in the morning, the stone of grief is set up as a monument of praise: Then, with my waking thoughts Bright with Thy praise, Out of my stony griefs Bethel I'll raise:

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So by my woes to be Nearer, my God to Thee, Nearer to Thee! The short rhythms of the first quatrain (6.4.6.4.) give way to the more expansive lines, which aspire to God, even through woes. The stanza form beautifully holds the movement of thought, from an acknowledgment of suffering to a transformation of it— Angels to beckon me Nearer, my God, to Thee, Nearer to Thee! What affliction God sends, He sends in mercy: it is a characteristic renunciation of happiness, but one which is given distinction by its use of elements in the story of Jacob's dream to express the pain and the hope of human existence.

Cecil Frances Alexander Cecil Frances Humphreys, subsequently and universally known as ‘Mrs Alexander’ after her marriage to the Bishop of Derry and Raphoe, published her Hymns for Little Children in 1848. The ‘little’ was important: as she wrote in a later hymn (published in W. F. Hook's Church School Hymn Book of 1850) We are but little children weak and the word ‘little’ occurs again and again in the 1848 book, either spoken by children themselves, or by an adult. It is a good example of the way in which women hymn-writers were able to write if they adopted a particular role—in this case either that of the Sunday-school teacher, or that of the infant, with its wide-eyed innocence. ‘Tiny’ goes along with ‘little’ as the adult points something out to the children: Each little flower that opens, Each little bird that sings, He made their glowing colours, He made their tiny wings and in the ‘Morning Hymn’ and the ‘Evening Hymn’ the child sings: When the eastern sky is red, I, too, lift my little head Soft and quiet is the bed Where I lay my little head— The parallel between the little things of nature and the small child is drawn explicitly in ‘The Third Promise’ (at Baptism: ‘to keep God's


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Holy Will and Commandments, and walk in the same all the days of my life’): Little birds sleep sweetly In their soft round nests, Crouching in the cover Of their mothers' breasts. Little lambs lie quiet All the summer night, With their old ewe mothers, Warm, and soft, and white. But more sweet and quiet Lie our little heads, With our own dear mothers Sitting by our beds. The word ‘little’ has a respectable provenance, from Matthew 18 (‘And Jesus called a little child’); but the chapter has now been exploited for its behavioural possibilities (all that insistence on ‘quiet’) and for its sentimental associations. Words such as ‘dear’, ‘warm’, ‘soft’, and ‘little’ encourage a certain deliberate naïvety, a refusal to enter the grown-up world, especially when the words are spoken by children. They may have a certain charm, but it is a charm that has its disadvantages: We are little Christian children, Saved by Him Who loved us most, We believe in God Almighty, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. This is not as repellently exclusive as Isaac Watts's thanks for being a Christian child and not a heathen or a Jew, but the children of Mrs Alexander's hymns are gently but firmly within the fold of the Church: We were only little babies, Knowing neither good nor harm, When the Priest of God Most Holy Took us gently on his arm. We know that we are saved because we have been baptized: And he sprinkled our young faces, With the water clean and bright, And he signed our Saviour's token On our little foreheads white. Children are often white in these hymns, most notably in heaven— When like stars His children crowned, All in white shall wait around.

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It is not clear if these are the spirits of children who have died in infancy, or if this is an image for innocence generally: it is part of a strange atmosphere of Mrs Alexander's hymns, involving little children, white angels, flowers and birds, the baby Jesus: Mary was that mother mild, Jesus Christ her little child. Only occasionally does the voice of the adult take over from this childlike, or childish, innocence; but when it does so the tone is that of the bossy Sunday-school teacher, frightening and severe: Little children must be quiet, When to Holy Church they go, They must sit with serious faces, Must not play or whisper low. For the Church is God's own Temple Where men go for praise and prayer, And the Great God will not love them Who forget His presence there. The threat of the withdrawal of love is uncomfortable evidence of the steely discipline that surrounds the little heads and the dear mothers. Behind the pretty pictures of little flowers and birds with tiny wings there is a patriarchal law that Mrs Alexander subscribes to with enthusiasm: Do no sinful action, Speak no angry word, Ye belong to Jesus, Children of the Lord. Christ is kind and gentle, Christ is pure and true, And his little children Must be holy too. The children ‘belong’ to Jesus; and in his possession, the operative word is ‘must’: Christian children all must be Mild, obedient, good as he. This portrayal of children is derived from Isaac Watts, where children are expected not to quarrel, to think of Sunday as the best day of the week, not to mix with frivolous playmates, and not to get dirty. In the same mode, Mrs Alexander's children are exhorted to be ‘little Saints on earth’: They must not fight or disobey, For Saints do never things like these; They must be holy, meek, and mild, And try the Lord to please.


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The problem, for Alexander as well as for others, is not just one of a restricted and repressive code of conduct, preaching unnatural subservience and quietness in the name of Christianity (of the kind which Blake attacked); it is also one of finding a satisfactory language for the moral commerce with the very young. Simplicity has an easy charm, but it also has its disadvantages, nowhere more so than in Alexander's comments on political economy. Addressing a poor child in a hymn on ‘Give us this day our daily bread’, she instructs it to kneel down and pray for ‘all things needful’: God made thy cottage home so dear, Gave store enough for frugal fare: If richer homes have better cheer, 'Twas God Who sent it there. This seems to involve the Almighty in a certain amount of inequitable distribution of the good things of this world, and it is not much comfort to be told: To the Holy Church we go, The dear Church of high and low, Where the poor man meanly dressed Is as welcome as the rest. Alexander's simplicities here communicate themselves in an embarrassing condescension, and it surely cannot be right for children of any age to be told— The rich man in his castle, The poor man at his gate, God made them, high or lowly, And ordered their estate. Such a commentary on Victorian society places the Church of England alongside those who had a vested interest in preserving things as they were; it is perhaps unfair to point out that Alexander lived in Ireland and her book was published only a year before the potato famine, but such juxtapositions help to point out her limitations. Such were the problems of writing with the kind of simplicity of idea and plainness of language that was thought necessary for children in 1848. But in addition to its disadvantages, such a simpleness has its good moments. When Alexander relates the gospel, she achieves a rare clarity and dignity: Once in royal David's City Stood a lowly cattle shed, Where a mother laid her Baby, In a manger for a bed. Mary was that mother mild, Jesus Christ her little child.

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The technique is that of the skilled story-teller. Once (once upon a time) a mother laid her new-born baby in a manger: her name was—Mary; and his name was—Jesus Christ. We are all familiar with the story, but we enjoy hearing it again, made new, told in this way. The lines are carefully paced, allowing a slow unfolding of the story, and an amplification of its meaning: He came down to earth from Heaven, Who is God and Lord of all, The lines are straightforward, with little in the way of rhetoric or inversion, except for the lulling repetition of the simple pattern: And his shelter was a stable, And his cradle was a stall. The same combination of clarity and pattern-repetition is found in Alexander's greatest hymn: He died that we might be forgiven, He died to make us good, In verse 4 the two halves of the verse similarly play variations on a theme: There was no other good enough To pay the price of sin, He only could unlock the gate Of Heaven, and let us in. As with ‘Once in royal David's City’ this hymn has a story-teller's opening: There is a green hill far away Without a city wall— The setting comes before the action: it is a green hill, but (unlike the green hills of Alexander's Ireland) far away, which invests it with a kind of mystery and magic. The ‘Without’ I take to be the Scottish ‘outwith’ or outside: in the context of the mysterious green hill it seems not to matter, to be part of the strange landscape. It is in this remote-seeming place that another familiar story is unfolded: Where the dear Lord was crucified Who died to save us all. This is straightforward narrative, utterly plain, succeeded by easy and unobtrusive doublings, ‘know . . . tell’, ‘hung and suffered’: We may not know, we cannot tell What pains he had to bear, But we believe it was for us He hung and suffered there.


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There is here, as Wordsworth had argued that there should be, no essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition.566 It produces its effect by presenting the pain and suffering as being, quite simply, ‘for us’. We are those for whom Christ was crucified—‘He died that we might be forgiven’—and for once Alexander's favourite ‘must’ seems to be justified: O, dearly, dearly has he loved, And we must love him too, And trust in his redeeming love And try his works to do. In any other hymn, the last line would probably have been acceptable as part of the hymn-rhetoric of inversion. In Alexander's hymn, because it has been so beautifully plain, it provides the only awkward moment. It comes after the highly emotional repetition of ‘O, dearly, dearly’ (which picks up the ‘dear Lord’ from verse 1) and the nicely reciprocal ‘we must love him too’: ‘his redeeming love’ is a fine summary of the poem's theme, only to be followed by a line where the simplicity is flat and awkward (are we to ‘try’ in the sense that we shall never succeed?). The ‘try’ of the last line is indicative of Alexander's greatest problem, which is that she is never quite sure how to treat children. At times they are given the sentimental gush about little children and tiny wings; at other times she tells stories; at other times she treats them as young Christians, who can be ticked off for misbehaving in church and who can be taught the gospel. Then they become those who can try, as though Alexander suddenly introduces a whole world of sin and failure, of the kind that adults are all too familiar with. This is why the last line—apart from its rhythmical flabbiness and its sense of anticlimax—seems so out-of-place in relation to the remainder of the hymn. Alexander's attitude to sin is simple, based on the Ten Commandments: On the goods that are not thine, Little Christian, lay no finger, Round thy neighbour's better things Let no wishful glances linger. (‘The eighth Commandment’) This is part of her conservative political economy, in which Christianity is intended to stifle any thoughts of incipient revolution: You must be content and quiet, Your appointed stations in;

566

William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800); Lyrical Ballads, ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones (2nd edn., London and New York, 1991), 253.

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For to envy, or to covet Other's goods, is mortal sin. (‘The tenth Commandment’) Above all, however, these poems reveal a concept of the child that is based on an adult's conception of what a child should be. This is seen most clearly in the poem on the seventh Commandment: I love the little snowdrop flower, The first in all the year, Without a stain upon its leaf, So snowy white and clear. I love a little modest child, That speaketh quietly, That blushes up to its blue eyes, And hardly answers me. I sometimes think the Church's Saints Are flowers so fair and bright, And that her little children are Her snowdrops sweet and white.567 This is an extreme example of a kind of nineteenth-century hymn-writing for children that was all too common, gratifying the wishes of adulthood and sweeping aside the real needs of children and adolescents.

Dora Greenwell Dora Greenwell suffered from ill-health for long periods. She told her friend Constance Maynard that ‘only those who had experienced the utter helplessness of life reduced to its lowest point, to an exhaustion that was all but extinction, could tell what it meant’.568 She may have been referring to a depression brought on by family problems: she lived for some eighteen years with her tyrannical mother in Durham, from the age of 33 to the age of 51 (1854–71). She had received an inadequate education, too, although she was a proficient linguist: her brother William, who was a Canon of Durham Cathedral and a notable antiquarian, called it ‘a very flimsy education for a sharp mind like hers’: Philosophy, biography, mediaeval legends, political economy—nothing came amiss, and she read widely. But when she tried to express herself, everything had the same defect; all was so undisciplined, so unfinished!569

567

It is interesting to note that Frances Mary Yonge's The Child's Christian Year has a snowdrop blocked on to the front cover. This was evidently a common emblem for a meek and innocent child.

568

Constance L. Maynard, The Life of Dora Greenwell (London, 1926), 40.

569

Ibid. 39.


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When confronted with this kind of masculine complacency, it is not surprising that Constance Maynard, Greenwell's biographer and a pioneer in women's education (she was the first Principal of Westfield College, London) should have written of the ‘constant pressure and thwarting’ of Dora Greenwell's nature, probably because her mother apparently ‘exerted a sort of passive resistance to any new acquaintances made by her daughter’:570 according to one of her friends— Her mother never thoroughly approved of her life, her occupations, or her friends, and seemed to think it her duty to be always checking her impulses and keeping her straight.571 Her occupations—despite her poor health (which may of course have been psychosomatic)—included prison-visiting, workhouse-visiting, and helping the poor. Her sharp and pointed, yet also jolly Christmas Carol, ‘If ye would hear the Angels sing’ indicates a concern for philanthropy: If ye would hear the Angels sing, Rise and spread your Christmas fare; 'Tis merrier still the more that share, On Christmas Day in the morning. Rise, and bake your Christmas bread: Christians, rise! the world is bare, And bleak, and dark with want and care, Yet Christmas comes in the morning. In her social work (like her friend Josephine Butler) she seems to have found a purpose that was denied to her by her family; but Jean Ingelow, who visited her in Durham, described her as living ‘in a shaded world’.572 Her frustrations occasionally showed: a new arrival in Durham was shocked by the freedom of her conversation, and ‘found people rather afraid of Miss Greenwell, because she said such unexpected things’.573 It is not surprising, perhaps, that this living representative of the tragedy that George Eliot presented in Maggie Tulliver and Dorothea Brooke should have felt frustrated, nor that one of her best-known hymns should have begun with an image of herself as de-skilled: I am not skilled to understand What God has willed, what God has planned; I only know at his right hand Stands one who is my Saviour. The point of the hymn is that she takes God at his word, simply, without trying to speculate: she reads the Gospel, and finds the need in her heart:

570

Ibid. 68.

571

Ibid. 98.

572

Ibid. 128.

573

Ibid. 130.

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I take God at his word and deed: Christ died to save me, this I read; And in my heart I find a need Of him to be my Saviour. And was there then no other way For God to take? I cannot say; I only bless him, day by day, Who saved me through my Saviour. The ‘I cannot say’ suggests that the theology is better left to the Canons of the Cathedral, such as her pompous brother William, who was continually telling her that she was no good as a writer: I remember I read one book (I forget which) and said, ‘Dora, I cannot see your aim. What is it you want to tell people? You seem to be in earnest, but what is the conclusion? You roll your subject over and over, and then you stop. I don't believe you know yourself what you want to teach!’574 Dora Greenwell's work demonstrates, in a particularly acute and poignant form, that love of life which was denied by circumstances. She had a great sense of fun: her poem on ‘The Saturday Review’ appeared in Punch, and is still worth reading,575 and she once held an impromptu dance in the kitchen of the house in Durham, out of earshot of her mother. At the same time, her health suffered from the strain of restraint and concealment. Her Essays, published in 1866, were prefaced by a quotation from Chaucer, which suggests that (like Sarah Flower Adams) she saw herself as a loser in life: That which is sent thee take in soothfastnesse; The wrestling of this life doth ask a fall. The fall is a failure of hope, the disappointment of expectations. In one of the poems from Carmina Crucis (1869), entitled ‘The Playfellows’, she recalled that Love, Hope, Joy, and I together Play'd, ah! many and many a day; The game was hide-and-seek: but one day Hope and Joy Hid so long and hid so well, We found them not, though keenly chiding; and the result was that We knew that we had seen the last Of Hope and Joy, no more together Play we there in summer weather.

574

Constance L. Maynard, The Life of Dora Greenwell (London, 1926), 122.

575

It is printed in Everyman's Book of Victorian Verse, ed. J. R. Watson (London, 1982), 186–8.


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What remained was endurance and fortitude: Dora Greenwell's emblem, on the title-page of Essays and of Carmina Crucis, was that of a hand holding a cross, with the words ‘Et Teneo at Teneor’ (‘I hold and am held’). The dedication quotes Luther, taking for the symbol of his theology a seal on which I had engraven a cross, with a heart in its centre. The cross is black, to indicate the sorrows, even unto death, through which the Christian must pass; but the heart preserves its natural colour, for the cross does not extinguish nature, it does not kill, but give life.576 Dora Greenwell's poetry is a perpetual dialogue between the heart and the cross—the cross which gives life, but which is an emblem of suffering. Her own suffering included her unmarried state, which she wrote about in a remarkable essay, ‘Our Single Women’, published in the North British Review in 1862, where she speaks of the problems of a single woman in the nineteenth century—‘It may now, perhaps, be harder for her than it has ever been to make her wishes and her fate agree’.577 The last poem in Carmina Crucis, from which her best-known hymn is taken, is entitled ‘Veni, veni, Emmanuel’; it demonstrates these conflicts with a directness that is peculiarly poignant. The first section, which deals with the vanquishing of Satan in the final Day of Judgement, also includes ‘the Reading of the Book’, the book of an individual person's life, known only to the self and to God, in which is found The tale of all that might have been; And Thou wilt read it o'er with me; And with Thy guiding help, I pierce Life's labyrinth now no longer vain; The love that frees the universe Hath made its broken story plain. The story is of the faded flower, that grew in the springtime of life, but which soon languished— A flower unwooed and uncaress'd By summer in its golden noon. The metaphors of wooing and caressing are unhappily indicative of Greenwell's single state, and of her emotional starvation: yet God will take pity on the lonely and the unloved, and they will one day understand. It is into this context that the third part of the poem comes: And art Thou come with us to dwell, Our Prince, our Guide, our Love, our Lord? And is thy name Emmanuel, God present with his world restored?

576

Quoted in Dora Greenwell, The Patience of Hope (London, 1859; new edn., 1900), 34.

577

‘On Single Women’, Essays (London and New York, 1866), 4.

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The hymn celebrates the abundant life that Dora Greenwell never knew: Thou bringest all again; with Thee Is light, is space, is breadth and room For each thing fair, beloved, and free, To have its hour of life and bloom. The images are startlingly appropriate to her own circumstances, but also wonderfully true to the sayings of Jesus (‘I am come that they may have life, and have it more abundantly’), and to the metaphors of rebirth and spring (‘whereby the dayspring from on high hath visited us’). The coming of the spring (‘to give light to them that sit in darkness, and in the shadow of death’—we may recall Jean Ingelow's impression that Dora Greenwell lived ‘in a shaded world’) allows the imagination to return to the hopes of childhood, flourishing in the warmth of the sun: Thy reign eternal will not cease; Thy years are sure, and glad, and slow; Within Thy mighty world of peace The humblest flower hath leave to blow, And spread its leaves to meet the sun, And drink within its soul the dew; The child's sweet laugh like light may run Through life's long day, and still be true; The presence of God upon earth, Emmanuel, ‘God with us’, means that hope and joy will be found again in the game of hide-and-seek, although Dora Greenwell's imagery for this (in the first line of the penultimate verse) is a wistful acknowledgment of a life that she never knew: The maid's fond sigh, the lover's kiss, The firm warm clasp of constant friend; And nought shall fail, and nought shall miss Its blissful aim, its blissful end. The verse moves towards the final happiness of this imagined consummation through images of human love (‘blissful . . . blissful’). With selfless courage, Dora Greenwell links the promise of human happiness with the eventual triumph of divine love (‘and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well’) in the manner of a medieval mystic: The world is glad for Thee! the heart Is glad for Thee! and all is well And fixed, and sure, because Thou Art, Whose name is called Emmanuel. The poem ends there, with its triumphant repetitions of assurance, although selections from it have often added a verse from the first section of ‘Veni, veni Emmanuel’ which ends ‘Come, mighty Victor over pain!’ Whichever


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ending is used, the effect is that of an Advent hymn which is wonderfully authentic, because the experience of the coming of light out of darkness is so relevant to Dora Greenwell's own spiritual and emotional state. As she wrote in The Patience of Hope (1859), ‘when Christ took our nature upon Him, He took it as it was’.578 It is that sense of ‘as it was’, fused into the images of patience and fortitude, that awareness of what she was and what she might have been, that makes her hymn-writing so touching and individual.

Frances Ridley Havergal Frances Ridley Havergal stands apart from the other women hymn-writers of the nineteenth century, if only because of her good health. Mrs Pitman's assertion that ‘she had many sharp attacks of illness, and consequent journeys in search of health’, already quoted, is only partly true. She was a good walker and a good swimmer, and the ‘journeys’ were often back-packing in mountains—Snowdonia and the Lake District—and on a number of occasions to the Alps, where she did some high-altitude climbing. For a Victorian woman, she was athletic and adventurous (she also sang hymns and preached to the other holiday-makers when on holiday). She was also a fine musician, and a poet whose energy found an outlet in all kinds of zestful verse—in acrostics, riddles, charades, and poems on the names of her sisters and friends. Some of her enthusiasm found its outlet in Sunday-school teaching, and she was a vigorous early supporter of the Young Women's Christian Association. Her delightful and ingenuous keenness is seen everywhere in her hymns: Who is on the Lord's side? Who will serve the King? Who will be his helpers Other lives to bring? Who will leave the world's side? Who will face the foe? Who is on the Lord's side? Who for Him will go? In the great game of life, Frances Ridley Havergal was picking her side: during the last week of her life, by the seaside near Swansea— The donkey boy, Fred Rosser, remembers that Miss Frances told him ‘I had better leave the devil's side and get on the safe side; that Jesus Christ's was the winning side; that He loved us and was calling us, and wouldn't I choose Him for my Captain?’579

578

Greenwell, The Patience of Hope, 7.

579

Memoirs of Frances Ridley Havergal, by her sister M. V. G. H. (Maria Vernon Graham Havergal) (London, 1880), 295–6.

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The concept of being on the winning side was deliberately calculated to win over a boy; and Havergal knew the power of that kind of appeal in her own life. In the poem ‘My Name’, she writes of discovering, as a child, that she was not just ‘little Fan’ but also ‘Ridley’, after the bishop and martyr: A diamond clasp it seems to be On golden chains enlinking me In loyal love to England's hope, Bulwark 'gainst infidel and Pope, The Church I hold so dear. Ridley stood for Protestantism and the Church of England, and this was Havergal's side. To that side she gave total obedience, all her enthusiastic self: Take my life, and let it be Consecrated, Lord, to Thee. What might be thought of as metaphorical is literally true: it was as a fine pianist and singer that she wrote Take my voice, and let me sing Always, only, for my King. And the verse Take my silver and my gold; Not a mite would I withhold should be set beside her conduct when Good Words paid her £10 17s. 6d. in 1863. She gave £10 to her father for the church, 10s. to the Scripture Readers' collection, and kept the 7s. 6d. ‘for any similar emergency’.580 This note of joyful enthusiasm is found in many places in her poetry—not everywhere, for she has the good sense to be funny on a number of occasions (as in her poem ‘To the Choir of Llangryffyth’, where they are gently chided for singing too fast) and she writes beautifully about nature and the sea. Her light-hearted side, however, was part of a complex nature that was prone to self-examination and self-questioning: Everyone calls me sweet tempered; but, oh, I have been so ruffled two or three times, that I wonder and grieve at myself. I always suffer for being naughty; I lose all enjoyment in prayer directly. ‘Oh, for a heart that never sins!’581 She had the good sense to realize that she was not perfect, and that those who claimed to be so were constructing fictions. In a sharp poem entitled ‘Autobiography’ she comments that there are plenty of examples in Mudie's bookshop—

580

Memoirs of Frances Ridley Havergal, by her sister M. V. G. H. (Maria Vernon Graham Havergal) (London, 1880), 343.

581

Ibid. 92.


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But look! I will tell you what is done By the writers, confidentially! They cut little pieces out of their lives And join them together, Making them up as a readable book, And call it an autobiography, Though little enough of the life survives. In ‘Compensation’, she writes of the ‘compensating springs’, the ‘balance-wheels of life’, by which ‘the balance of sorrow and joy is held with an even hand’. Her illustration is taken from her days in the high Alps: Only between the storms can the Alpine traveller know Transcendent glory of clearness, marvels of gleam and glow; Had he the brightness unbroken of cloudless summer days, This had been dimmed by the dust and the veil of a brooding haze. Who would dare the choice, neither or both to know, The finest quiver of joy or the agony-thrill of woe? Never the exquisite pain, then never the exquisite bliss, For the heart that is dull to that can never be strung to this. The idea is the same as that in Keats's Odes, and fuelled by the same appetite for life, though the diction is (characteristically) ordinary—‘cloudless summer days’, ‘quiver of joy’; but in Havergal there is an additional factor, and that is consecration. On Advent Sunday 1873 she wrote: I first saw clearly the blessedness of true consecration. I saw it as a flash of electric light, and what you see you can never unsee. There must be full surrender before there can be full happiness.582 It was soon after this that she wrote the ‘Consecration Hymn’, ‘Take my life, and let it be’. The word that she then used, again and again, was ‘Master’, to which she gave a particular interpretation as a woman. She saw submission as inextricable from love (as in the word ‘obey’ in the marriage service): ‘O Master!’ It is perhaps my favourite title, because it implies rule and submission; and this is what love craves. Men may feel differently, but a true woman's submission is inseparable from deep love.583 ‘Whose I am’ thus begins ‘Jesus, Master, whose I am’, and ‘Master’ is the key word in one of her best-known hymns: Master, speak! Thy servant heareth, Waiting for Thy gracious word, Longing for Thy voice that cheereth; Master! let it now be heard.

582

Ibid. 126.

583

Ibid. 138.

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I am listening, Lord, for Thee; What hast Thou to say to me? The direct opposition of the last two lines is found in a more demanding form (because it is Christ who speaks) in ‘I gave My life for thee’, written after an exhausting day in the Alps: I gave My life for thee; What hast thou given for Me? The verses go on and on, inexorably questioning, and in some printings backed up by a scriptural reference at the end of every line: I spent long years for thee; John i. 10, 11 Hast thou spent one for Me? 1 Pet. iv. 2. This is strenuous and demanding, but it is part of the way in which Havergal throws herself whole-heartedly into situations: God speaks, she submits and listens, in order to be able to speak to others: Lord speak to me, that I may speak In living echoes of Thy tone; As Thou hast sought, so let me seek Thy erring children, lost and lone. The verses continue this pattern—‘O lead me, Lord, that I may lead’ . . . ‘O teach me, Lord, that I may teach’, the servant trying to do the master's will. The Long Metre here is reflective, as opposed to the more rousing 6.5.6.5., which Havergal often uses, but the energy is still directed outward: O give Thine own sweet rest to me, That I may speak with soothing power A word in season, as from Thee, To weary ones in needful hour. The phrases everywhere are simple, which is Havergal's weakness as a hymn-writer: she has a tendency to use the lifeless and expected adjective—‘living echoes’, ‘erring children’, ‘soothing power’, ‘weary ones’. Often this weakness is concealed by the brisk rhythms of the short-lined poems, but the more expansive Long Metre reveals the shortcomings of phrase and adjective. The occasional surprise makes the conventional diction all the more obvious, as in the little poem ‘Finis’, which discusses the book of poems to which it is the conclusion: It is,—and yet it is not A transcript of my soul; For the passing gleams of light, And the passing clouds that roll— Like an unwilled photograph, Have printed their image clear;


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The use of the printed image (in the early days of photography) only serves to show up the less original ‘clouds that roll’. Havergal wanted her poetry to be not a star, nor a rainbow, nor a fountain, but a hidden stream (‘No, not a Star’). Yet the principal tone is one of exhortation, as from one who leads from the front, with lines of unmemorable diction but rhythmic purpose: Standing at the portal Of the opening year, Words of comfort meet us, Hushing every fear; . . . Onward, then, and fear not, Children of the day! For His word shall never, Never pass away! The new year was a particularly important time for Havergal, and she wrote a number of hymns for it (‘Another year is dawning’). It was a time for new dedication, for cheering others on, for ‘another year of service’, for a reaffirmation of first principles. In the same way, she always kept the anniversary of her confirmation on 18 July 1854. It was a part of the rededication which appeared again and again in her hymns, so that she returned to her own writing to verify her experience. In her last winter, in December 1878, she wrote: I have said intensely this morning ‘Take my love’, and He knows I have. So I did not fidget any more, or worry the Master any more about it. I shall just go forward and expect Him to fill it up, and let my life from this day answer really to that couplet.584 The ‘couplet’ is from the ‘Consecration Hymn’ (which was written in couplets): Take my love; my Lord, I pour At Thy feet its treasure store. The allusion is to Mary Magdalen anointing the feet of Jesus, which is a fitting emblem for Frances Ridley Havergal, whose hymns continually represent Jesus as ‘Master’ and preach submission to him in love. In such a way, the Victorian woman took her place, all her energies concentrated on the Saviour, her naturally subordinate position sublimated into adoration. But in Frances Ridley Havergal it is also distinguished by her sheer enthusiasm, a wonderful energy and keenness that turns Christianity into a thrilling cause, to live and die for.

584

Memoirs of Frances Ridley Havergal, by her sister M. V. G. H. (Maria Vernon Graham Havergal) (London, 1880), 269–70.

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Anna Laetitia Waring Anna Laetitia Waring is chiefly known for her Hymns and Meditations (1850), and especially for the first hymn in the book, ‘Father, I know that all my life|Is portioned out for me’. Waring's parents were Quakers, but (with their approval) she became a member of the Church of England in 1842. In the words of her biographer, Mary S. Talbot, ‘the desire awoke in her for some more expressive worship than that which she found in the Meeting House of Friends.’585 In spite of this, it is possible to see in ‘Father, I know that all my life’ something of a residual Quaker quietness: I would not have the restless will That hurries to and fro, Seeking for some great thing to do Or secret thing to know; I would be treated as a child, And guided where I go. This was written in 1846, but there is nothing to connect it with the anguished struggles that were going on in the Church she had so recently joined. Its prayer for the acceptance of one's lot may have been one reason for its extraordinary popularity, for it was a hymn for those who would avoid controversy: Wherever in the world I am, In whatsoe'er estate, I have a fellowship with hearts To keep and cultivate; And a work of lowly love to do For the Lord on whom I wait. ‘They also serve who only stand and wait’; but this is only a part of the story, because Waring's departure from the Society of Friends was caused by emotional and sensual needs. ‘The desire’, in Mary Talbot's words, ‘awoke in her.’ It can be seen, even in the quiet verses of ‘Father, I know that all my life’ in the skipping extra syllable that gives life and energy to the verse, or the unexpected trochee of ‘Seeking’ that disturbs the tranquil iambics. In the same manner, Waring's life was more than ‘waiting’: she visited prisons, and admired nurses, and published two books with extraordinary proverbial titles.586 In her personal life, she had some friendships ‘of singular depth and intensity’, and one in particular with a ‘gifted friend’ (a woman). Waring destroyed most of the correspondence between them, and (in the words of

585

Talbot, Anna Laetitia Waring, 5.

586

‘What can't be cured must be endured’; or, Christian patience and forbearance in Practice, (London, 1854); and ‘Early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise’; or, Early rising a natural, social and religious Duty (Northampton, 1856).


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the biographer) ‘of the few which remain, none are suitable for publication’.587 This suggests a relationship which in 1911 (when the memoir was written, in the year after Waring's death) would have been thought shocking; and Waring's passionate nature is clear in this hymn on a loved one's death: I love to have thee by my side With thy sweet face so pure and bright, While in my Saviour's robe I hide, A robe like thine, exceeding white; Blest with the blessed ones above, Seen by His light, and with His love . . . Oft in my secret communings With thoughts of those who count thee dear, I speak to thee of many things That others would not care to hear; Now that no pain thy love can share I like to think that thou wilt care— In this astonishing poem, Waring feels close to the loved one because she is with God: And blest will our communion be, With thee in Him and Him in thee. ‘My beloved is mine and I am his’: the line from The Song of Songs is put into the second and third persons, and the twist gives an entry into a new meaning. If the beloved is with God, then the lover on earth can have access to her through the Holy Communion. The loved one is ‘Seen by His light, and with His love’. The lovers are united in Christ, who ‘died for thee and me’. At the same time there is a complex interaction between those on earth and in heaven, both of whom are transfigured by love: I do not bid thee now farewell (A prayer unmeet for life like thine,) With thy beloved in heaven I dwell, And thy beloved on earth are mine. My heart with them, and theirs with thee, How canst thou, dear one, distant be? The lovely endearment in the last line is characteristic of Waring's tenderness and freedom. The poem looks forward to a reunion in heaven—‘And we shall see thee face to face’—but also emphasizes the strength of love that continues to exist in the lover left on earth: Meanwhile, to thee with whom we live A hidden life by night and day,

587

Talbot, Anna Laetitia Waring, 9.

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Pain we are sure we cannot give, But pleasure I believe we may: And this belief henceforth shall be New life, new strength, new joy to me. ‘A hidden life’: Waring is apparently talking about the life of the spirit, a bond between heaven and earth, but the context of the whole poem suggests another kind of ‘hidden life’, a love between the two women that could not be revealed but which gave nothing but pleasure. Waring's hymns exist in this difficult area in which she tries to relate human love to divine love. In one hymn she writes of human love as necessarily transient and inadequate in a way that points to a finer love: If loving hearts were never lonely, If all they wish might always be, Accepting what they look for only, They might be glad, but not in Thee. The reasoning is certainly present, but the feelings of loneliness and frustration are too. At times Waring will see them as essential: Well may Thy happy children cease From restless wishes prone to sin, And, in Thy own exceeding peace, Yield to Thy daily discipline. In the strength of feeling which this betrays, in the intensity of human love, and its relationship to a divine love, is found the distinctive note of Waring's hymns. In them she has sublimated the passion into the religious life, but the intensity and the tensions remain. She writes again and again of divine love in images of water: God is ‘Source of my life's refreshing springs’ and ‘Source of my spirit's deep desire’: And still I hope—Oh, not in vain! I know, this holy seed possessing, Thou wilt come down like gentle rain, And make the barren ground a blessing. The imagery of Portia's speech from The Merchant of Venice is only one way of describing divine love and mercy. At other points, Waring transfers the passion of her own experience to God: Would that I were more closely bound To my Beloved, who ever lives— Would that my soul were always found Abiding in the peace He gives— Would that I might more clearly see His love an heritage for me—


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‘Abiding’ is a word which has strong biblical associations of abiding with Christ. In Waring's work it is connected with love: In Heavenly Love abiding No change my heart shall fear, This is the same passion that fuels the earthly love: but the great joy of heavenly love is that it does not change. The hymn very subtly contrasts the depressions and temptations of earth with the reassurance of the divine presence: The storm may roar without me, My heart may low be laid, But God is round about me, And can I be dismayed? The emphasis is again on the heart, the seat of the affections: and the hymn is powerful because it recognizes so strongly the tug of earthly moods and feelings, and contrasts them with the protective security of God: He knows the way he taketh, And I will walk with him. In the third verse, the storm is over and the bright weather returns: Green pastures are before me Which yet I have not seen, Bright skies will soon be o'er me, Where the dark clouds have been. The contrasts are deliberately strong—bright instead of dark—and Waring's images are invariably strong and physical, those of a lover. The state of being apart from God is one of dryness, desert, thirst, dark clouds; the images for being with God are those of water—refreshing springs, tasting, enjoying, the fulfilment of desire. Divine grace is rendered in such language: My heart is resting, O my God,— I will give thanks and sing; My heart is at the secret source Of every precious thing. Now the frail vessel Thou hast made No hand but Thine shall fill— For the waters of the earth have failed, And I am thirsty still. I thirst for springs of heavenly life, And here all day they rise— In the world of grace the heart is satisfied, the desires answered:

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There is a multitude around Responsive to my prayer: I hear the voice of my desire Resounding everywhere. The passionate, thirsty heart will finally be satisfied in heaven, a heaven of joy and health, with singing and countersinging. Satisfied desire leads to a final line of superb brevity and stability: My heart is resting, O my God, My heart is in Thy care— I hear the voice of joy and health Resounding everywhere. ‘Thou art my portion’, saith my soul, Ten thousand voices say, And the music of their glad Amen Will never die away. Waring's conception of heaven is traditional enough, with singing everywhere: but its expression suggests that heaven would be, for her, a place where her passionate nature could finally be fulfilled, where she would give thanks, over and over, for bright skies, and green pastures, for joy and health, for streams of living water that quench all thirst; and above all for a satisfied love, that because it is divine cannot change and cannot be thwarted: Ere another step I take In my wilful wandering way, Still I have a choice to make— Shall I alter while I may? Patient love is waiting still In my Saviour's heart for me; Love to bend my forward will, Love to make me really free. The Saviour's heart waits for her own heart. It is typical of the way, in Waring's hymns, the wilful wanderer ends up walking with God: My hope I cannot measure, My path to life is free, My Saviour has my treasure, And he will walk with me. In such walking comes the freedom that was never known on earth, because of the frustrations of hidden love, and the transience of earthly happiness: so that heaven becomes the place of all the fulfilment that was denied, where the heart rejoices and the thirsty soul ‘tastes’ the joys that will never end:


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And a new song is in my mouth To long-loved music set; Glory to Thee for all the grace I have not tasted yet. The song is new, but the music is old: what we learn on earth (Browning would have agreed) we shall practise in heaven. And what we learn about love on earth, so imperfectly, will be found in its fullest and freest form in the neverending streams of living water. Instead of the hidden (and forbidden) love, the soul will enjoy its own open fulfilment; and the strength of Waring's hymns is the emotional power which comes from a recognition of her own passionate nature, and the relating of it to divine love.

Some Women Poets A number of nineteenth-century women poets wrote hymns or sacred poems, and a few of their poems have become well known as hymns, such as Adelaide Anne Procter's ‘Thankfulness’, with its slightly awkward trochee in line 4: My God, I thank Thee who hast made The Earth so bright; So full of splendour and of joy, Beauty and light; her argument, which is neatly expressed, is that human hearts have much to be thankful for, but We have enough, yet not too much To long for more: A yearning for a deeper peace, Not known before. The hymn is a meditation on the idea that ‘our hearts are restless until they find rest in Thee’, and it is a hymn which improves as it goes on, from the first rather superficial jauntiness. Procter wrote a number of religious poems with a tendency towards narrative (including ‘The Lost Chord’), which makes them unsuitable as hymns; she also wrote an interesting gender-based poem entitled ‘A Woman's Question’, which throws some light on the way in which women writers saw themselves. It is a monologue spoken by a woman to her affianced lover, asking for the same kind of total surrender which she is offering: If thou canst feel Within thy inmost soul, That thou hast kept a portion back, While I have staked the whole; Let no false pity spare the blow, but in true mercy tell me so.

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Is there within thy heart a need That mine cannot fulfil? The emphasis is on the heart, and the poem ends—‘Whatever on my heart may fall—remember, I would risk it all!’ The same note can be heard in Christina Rossetti's Yet what I can I give Him, Give my heart. Both Rossetti and Procter use short lines to make pithy and reverberant statements of this kind, and in both the heart is invested with qualities of a particular intensity. When Emily Brontë mentions the heart, on the other hand, it is ‘the savage heart’. This occurs in her poem ‘My Comforter’, in which she attacks contemporary hymn-singing, with a pointed allusion to the evangelical use of the word ‘wretch’ (as in Newton's ‘Amazing Grace’). She writes of: wretches uttering praise, Or howling o'er their hopeless days, And each with frenzy's tongue— A Brotherhood of misery, With smiles as sad as sighs; Emily Brontë's heart, like that of Cathy in Wuthering Heights, was too rebellious to be orthodox, but when she does write of God there is a sense that she has her own brilliant agenda: O God within my breast Almighty, ever-present Deity Life, that in me hast rest As I Undying Life, have power in Thee This is an extreme example of an inner light, which causes her to be impatient of conventional belief: Vain are the thousand creeds That move men's hearts, unutterably vain, Worthless as withered weeds Or idlest froth amid the boundless main To waken doubt in one Holding so fast by thy infinity So surely anchored on The steadfast rock of Immortality This poem, ‘No coward soul is mine’ was printed in Songs of Praise, but it is in too awkward a metre (6.10.6.10), as well as being too unorthodox, for hymn-singing. The penultimate verse, however, has an inspiring vision of the greatness of God:


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Though Earth and moon were gone And suns and universes cease to be And thou wert left alone Every existence would exist in thee—588 Such direct and inspiring expression is beyond Emily Brontë's sister Anne, but she is a better hymn-writer, if only because she is more consistent and organized in her work, and she followed the example of others. She copied out hymns and tunes into a manuscript book, beginning with Charles Wesley's ‘O for a heart to praise my God’, and including others by Isaac Watts, Thomas Kelly, Reginald Heber, and James Montgomery.589 She was also deeply influenced by Cowper, who seemed to express her own religious feelings, to speak for her (and only for her): Sweet are thy strains, Celestial Bard, And oft in childhood's years I've read them o'er and o'er again With floods of silent tears. The language of my inmost heart I traced in every line— My sins, my sorrows, hopes and fears Were there, and only mine. Like her sisters, she rejected Calvinism.590 Reading Cowper's biography, she was appalled by his despair, and she preferred to see him as saved. His ‘gentle soul’ has found its home in God's bosom: It must be so if God is love And answers fervent prayer; Then surely thou shalt dwell on high And I may meet thee there. If Cowper's belief in his own damnation was true, what hope is there for the rest of us? Yet should thy darkest fears be true, If Heaven be so severe That such a soul as thine is lost, O! how shall I appear? The direct question ends the poem with a stab of guilt and uncertainty, unresolved by any of the confidence of hymnwriters such as Charles Wesley (‘Bold I approach th'eternal throne’). Anne Brontë's hymns are

588

The poems of Emily Brontë are taken from The Complete Poems of Emily Jane Brontë, ed. C. W. Hatfield (New York, 1941).

589

See The Poems of Anne Brontë, ed. Edward Chitham (London, 1979), 34.

590

Ibid. 89–90, and note, p. 176.

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moving and convincing because of this sharp awareness of failure and doubt, which gives authenticity and value to her faith (‘my feeble faith’, she called it in ‘A Prayer’). One hymn, beginning ‘Eternal power of earth and air’, prays for stronger faith: While Faith is with me I am blest; It turns my darkest night to day; But while I clasp it to my breast I often feel it slide away. Here, as elsewhere, Anne Brontë uses startlingly physical images—dark night, clasping, sliding: one hymn that has become widely used begins with images of oppression and danger: Oppressed by sin and woe, A burdened heart I bear, Opposed by many a mighty foe: But I will not despair. This hymn is entitled ‘Confidence’. It sets up the weakness and failure of the burdened soul in order to reassert the providence of God: I need not fear my foes, I need not yield to care, I need not sink beneath my woes: For Thou wilt answer prayer. Anne Brontë's poetic moods swing between her unhappiness and a fragile hope. Those poems which have been used as hymns conclude with acceptance and hope for rest, but they arrive at such a point through a vividly realized struggle. One of her poems sees that ‘upward path’ in terms of mountain climbing: Believe not those who say The upward path is smooth, Lest thou shouldst stumble in the way And faint before the truth. The hymn exhorts the Christian to use ‘all his powers’ in this journey, for ‘there amid the sternest heights, | The sweetest flowerets gleam’; and—changing the metaphor to one from Ephesians 6—he is to ‘Arm, arm thee for the fight!’ The soul is given a succession of instructions—‘Watch’, ‘Toil’, ‘Crush pride’, ‘Trample down lust’, ‘Seek not treasure here’, and these instructions come faster and faster: To labour and to love, To pardon and endure, To lift thy heart to God above, And keep thy conscience pure,—


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Only in the last two verses does the hymn begin to slow down. It starts to employ doublings and repetitions: Be this thy constant aim, Thy hope and thy delight,— What matters who should whisper blame, Or who should scorn or slight? This leads in to the final verse, with its conclusion in ‘rest’, to which all the energy of the earlier verses leads: What matters—if thy God approve, And if within thy breast, Thou feel the comfort of his love, The earnest of his rest? This hymn is more concerned with instruction than experience. Anne Brontë's last poem, beginning ‘A dreadful darkness closes in’ (written in January 1849, a few months before her death), has been used as a hymn, but it shows experience predominating. It is very painful in its recognition of obscurity and weakness, and valuable for that very reason: I hoped amid the brave and strong My portioned task might lie, To toil amid the labouring throng With purpose pure and high. Into this poem come all the accumulated frustrations of a life spent as an unmarried woman and a governess, and concluding, far too early, in a wasting illness. Anne Brontë had had her dreams (one of her poems, ‘Dreams’, describes the joy of nursing a baby) and her games (the Gondal sequence of poems, written with Emily) and almost certainly her love (for her father's curate, William Weightman, who died young). She read the signs that all these were to come to an end; and Branwell and Emily had already predeceased her. The poem thus acquires a rare power in its bold acquaintance with pain, and as a hymn it serves an unusual purpose of providing for all those who are dying without having had an opportunity to live, whose purpose is nevertheless a great one: That secret labour to sustain With humble patience every blow, To gather fortitude from pain And hope and holiness from woe. Uncertain about the prognosis of the disease, Anne writes both of continuing to live, and of dying: If Thou shouldst bring me back to life More humbled I should be;

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More wise, more strengthened for the strife, More apt to lean on Thee. Should Death be standing at the gate Thus should I keep my vow; But, Lord, whate'er my future fate So let me serve Thee now. Its raw expression of personal grief almost disqualifies this poem as a hymn (it was used in the Methodist Hymn Book of 1933), but it modulates into a prayer to serve, even in illness and dying, and for that reason it has a useful function. Its strength is in its anguish: it is at the farthest remove from those hymns which bury the unpleasant things of life and death in a covering of praise and prayer. Of all the Victorian women poets who bravely confront their anguish and sorrow, the most impressive is Christina Rossetti. Some of the titles of the ‘Devotional Pieces’ in The Prince's Progress and Other Poems (1866) tell their own story—‘Long Barren’, ‘If Only’, ‘Dost Thou not Care?’, ‘Weary in Well-Doing’. She is the poet of what W. David Shaw has called ‘the anguish of [the] harrowed heart’.591 And yet out of this comes a trust in God that is profoundly moving in its awareness of the possibility of love and wholeness: Lord, we are rivers running to Thy sea, Our waves and ripples all derived from Thee: A nothing we should have, a nothing be, Except for Thee. (‘The Ransomed of the Lord’)She felt her position as a woman acutely (her brothers would have liked her to be allowed to attend meetings of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, but the other members—male, of course—vetoed it); and not surprisingly, perhaps, one biography of her is entitled ‘Learning not to be First’,592 with a quotation from ‘The Lowest Room’: Not to be first: how hard to learn That lifelong lesson of the past; Line graven on line and stroke on stroke, But, thank God, learned at last. The metaphor from engraving suggests the moments of self-sacrifice cutting into the soul; and yet that process was Christina Rossetti's path to faith and acceptance. The road lies uphill all the way, but at the end there are beds for all who come.

591

W. David Shaw, ‘Poet of Mystery: The Art of Christina Rossetti’, in David A. Kent (ed.), The Achievement of Christina Rossetti (Ithaca, NY and London, 1987), 55.

592

Kathleen Jones, Learning not to be First: A Biography of Christina Rossetti (Adlestrop, Glos., 1991).


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For one who wrote so many poems about love (and who loved in her own life, and was rejected), the Christmas story had a particular resonance: the coming of the Christ child was the supreme sign of God's power to intervene in human history, to demonstrate his love for the unhappy and undeserving world. So the poem ‘Christmastide’ plays throughout on the rhyme Divine/sign (with one ‘mine’) because that is the centre of the Christmas story. Christina Rossetti alludes only briefly to the actual events—‘Star and Angels gave the sign’: the remainder of the poem treats the Incarnation as a theological, almost abstract, affair. The reader has to supply the manger, the Virgin and Joseph, the ox and the ass: instead of these the poem speaks of love being born, love being itself and signifying itself, lovely love, divine love: Love came down at Christmas, Love all lovely, love Divine; Love was born at Christmas, Star and Angels gave the sign.593 The sign comes from Luke 2: 12: ‘And this shall be a sign unto you’; but the sign is not the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger, but love itself, which is the central signifier and signified, love reflecting itself in its loveliness, with all elements of the story united—God becoming man, God as love, God as gift, God as sacrifice in Jesus; and human love, for men and women, and for God: Love shall be our token, Love be yours and love be mine, Love to God and all men, Love for plea and gift and sign. The last line contains a whole systematic theology, and the little poem is so packed with meaning that there is no time to admire the beauty of the Christmas scene. The opposite is true of the other Christmas hymn by Christina Rossetti, in which the details are as sharp and clear as a medieval Book of Hours, or as an early Italian painting (which she would have known through her brothers' interest): In the bleak mid-winter Frosty wind made moan, Earth stood hard as iron, Water like a stone; The cold and bleakness are symptomatic of an inner winter: Christina Rossetti is often a poet of dark and miserable weather. The word ‘bleak’

593

The text is from The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti, ed. R. W. Crump (Baton Rouge, La. and London, 1979).

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is particularly significant, alerting the mind instantly to the intense images that follow—the wind that ‘made moan’, the earth like iron and the water like stone. Each is dropped into its separate line with a placing that is very sensitive, the slight variations of rhythm adding to the separateness of each element, yet also permitting the unexpected contribution of each to the total scene. The line breaks allow the picture to build up in successive layers, falling like the snow itself, so that the poem's shape enacts a covering of snow, covered by another, and then another: Snow had fallen, snow on snow, Snow on snow, In the bleak mid-winter Long ago. The repetition of the first line is part of the way in which this stanza both repeats and changes, allowing some images one memorable appearance and then alternating them with other recurring images—bleakness, snow. Then comes the sudden surprise, seemingly out of nowhere (apart from the title ‘A Christmas Carol’, there is nothing to prepare for the astonishing second verse): Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him Nor earth sustain; Heaven and earth shall flee away When He comes to reign. The unexpected rhythm of the first line is matched by the suddenness with which the new idea is introduced: from the picture of the winter weather, we are now in a world of cosmic upheaval. The connection is then made between the first verse and the second: In the bleak mid-winter A stable-place sufficed The Lord God Almighty Jesus Christ. ‘The Lord God Almighty’ echoes the majesty of the first four lines, to be contrasted with the stable-place in the cold winter; the final line with its three syllables makes the perfect ending: just the name, Jesus Christ, God become man. The contrasts continue between his majesty, signified by the worshipping cherubim, and his humility, expressed in two simple lines, one image to each line: Enough for Him whom cherubim Worship night and day, A breastful of milk And a mangerful of hay;


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In the next verse, the two-line units of the first half give way to the ‘But’ which describes the Virgin Mary (described only as ‘His mother’), who does her kind of worship in the simplest and most human of motherly actions—‘With a kiss’: Angels and archangels May have gathered there, Cherubim and seraphim Throng'd the air, But only His mother In her maiden bliss Worshipped the Beloved With a kiss. The slight irregularities, the unusual rhythms, all resolve themselves into the three-syllabled final line; as they do in the final verse, which ends Yet what I can I give Him, Give my heart. Christina Rossetti is no figure in the story: she is no shepherd, no wise man. She sees herself as poor—‘Poor as I am’. Like so many of her short lines, this carries with it a tremendous charge, her poverty being her whole self, her place as a woman, her sense of winter and bleakness; and yet she is still able to respond to the situation, to give her heart. The carol has an art that is delicate and unusual: its controlled irregularity makes it a delight to read and sing, and it has been set to music with sensitivity by two composers (Holst and Darke). Above all, it sets the great contrasts between the Lord God Almighty and the child in the manger in the context of the giving heart. The spare diction, the short lines, the pauses at the end of some lines and the running-on at the end of others, allow the imagination to see and encourage the heart to engage. Christina Rossetti has been seen as a limited poet because of her Christianity. But, as Betty S. Flowers has pointed out, ‘while her religious ideals as a Victorian woman may have narrowed the possibilities of her artistic life, it was her religion that enabled her to break free enough of the conventions of Victorian womanhood to write at all.’594 For all the writers discussed in this chapter the same is true: their hymn-writing was a way of expressing themselves, often in ways that were limited by the expectations which were laid upon them, or by their own refusal to cross boundaries. But the patterns of religious belief, of surrender and subordination, and the images of health and sickness, of poverty and grace, are very revealing. These

594

Betty S. Flowers, ‘The Kingly Self: Rossetti as Woman Author’, in Kent (ed.), The Achievement of Christina Rossetti, 165.

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women see themselves as taking up their cross and following Jesus, struggling along the via dolorosa towards their final reward: Nearer, my God, to Thee, Nearer to Thee!

17 American Hymnody So speeds the Heavenly Muse, at His behest, Across the waters; so the spreading vine Of sacred poetry, with clusters fine, By Western airs is welcomed and caressed.

(Richard Wilton, 1896)

The same tension between the supporters of the metrical psalm and those of the hymn that had occurred in England in the seventeenth century took place in America in the eighteenth century, together with some of the same controversies about singing in church. The Bay Psalm Book, discussed briefly in an earlier chapter, was one of the psalm books which dominated worship until the arrival of Watts's Psalms of David (the first American edition was printed in 1729, only ten years after the British edition). Watts's Hymns and Spiritual Songs followed in 1739, and Tate and Brady's ‘New Version’ was also in use in some churches. The decisive event which altered the course of American hymnody (as a small by-product of altering the course of nationhood) was the successful outcome of the War of Independence and the departure of the British. Phrases in Watts's psalms about the British Isles, and prayers for the king in the Book of Common Prayer were no longer appropriate; after some unsuccessful attempts at rewriting, the General Association of Connecticut asked Timothy Dwight, President of Yale College, to produce an official version, which appeared in 1801.595 The story of early American hymn-books needs to be described with reference to every church, for each had its own. The work has been done in meticulous detail by Louis F. Benson,596 and there is no need to repeat it here, except to indicate the broad lines of influence on indigenous hymn-writers. The ‘Great Awakening’ of 1739 to 1741, led by Jonathan Edwards at Northampton and given additional impetus by an evangelical visit from George Whitefield, quickened an interest in hymn-singing, and increased

595

See Louis F. Benson's pamphlet, The American Revisions of Watts's ‘Psalms ’ (n.d. (1904) ).

596

See Louis F. Benson, The English Hymn (London, 1915), 161 ff.

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the popularity of Watts's work. Other denominations and places had their anthologies, such as that of the Unitarians in Philadelphia, which included hymns by Watts, Doddridge, Steele, Cowper, and others; another popular book was John Rippon's Selection of Hymns, especially among the Baptists. The Methodists began with selections from Wesley, while in the Southern states the African Methodist Episcopal Church produced ‘the first Book of Song published by the Children of Oppression’ in 1818. Hymns were mostly imported from the mainstream of English Dissenting and Evangelical hymnody, therefore; although the first major American hymn, ‘Great God of wonders’ by Samuel Davies, dates from the mid-eighteenth century. The first important American book to be seriously different from English ones was Asahel Nettleton's Village Hymns of 1824, which included a considerable selection from English writers such as Anne Steele, John Newton, and James Montgomery, but also included Americans such as Phoebe Brown and William B. Tappan. Brown is neat and restrained, especially in Short Metre, even when she is hoping for another ‘Awakening’: O Lord, Thy work revive, In Zion's gloomy hour; And make her dying graces live By Thy restoring power. This could have been written by any hymn-writer in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century who had been brought up on the clarity of Watts. Tappan, on the other hand, was much more dramatic, not to say melodramatic, in his hymn (which became extremely well known) ‘’Tis midnight—and on Olive's brow'. He skilfully combined an awareness of suffering with a promise of consolation: 'Tis midnight—and for others' guilt The Man of Sorrows weeps in blood; Yet He, that hath in anguish knelt Is not forsaken by His God. 'Tis midnight—from the heavenly plains Are borne the songs that angels know; Unheard by mortals are the strains That sweetly soothe the Saviour's woe. The intensity of this text bears out the observation of de Tocqueville that ‘there is no country in the world where the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America’.597 What is interesting is that not only was America a God-fearing society, but that it was conscious of being so.

597

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer and Max Lerner (New York, 1966), 271.

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The nation ‘My country ’tis of thee', by the Baptist minister Samuel F. Smith, is an example of national pride, of joy in the beauty of the new continent, and a centring of both of these on God: My native country, thee— Land of the noble, free— Thy name—I love; I love thy rocks and rills, Thy woods and templed hills; My heart with rapture thrills Like that above. The poem is a polemical rewriting of ‘God save the King’, with a last verse ending Protect us by Thy might Great God, our King. Smith has substituted the heavenly king for the earthly one, and emphasized the place of the chosen people. Similarly, Oliver Wendell Holmes's ‘Prayer during War’ ends Reign Thou, our kingless nation's Lord; Rule Thou our throneless land! ‘Kingless’ (a word used by Shelley) was a thrilling concept. Freedom was celebrated as the great blessing of nineteenthcentury America, and so Samuel Johnson's ‘Life of ages, richly poured’ makes it clear that the love of God is Flowing in the prophet's word And the people's liberty! In this reading of American history, liberty came originally with the Pilgrim Fathers, together with the other great moral and spiritual qualities that were to be found in the United States: Laws, freedom, truth, and faith in God Came with those exiles o'er the waves; (Leonard Bacon, ‘The Pilgrim Fathers’) and this was given an Old Testament typology by Henry Ware, Jr., Emerson's colleague at Boston from 1829 onwards. His hymn, ‘The God of our Fathers’, has a fine verse with a resounding and beautifully articulated last line, a spectacular compression: Like Israel's hosts to exile driven, Across the flood the Pilgrims fled;

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Their hands bore up the ark of Heaven, And Heaven their trusting footsteps led, Till on these savage shores they trod, And won the wilderness for God. They were the heirs of the Protestant Reformation, which James Freeman Clarke gave thanks for: For all thy gifts we bless Thee, Lord, With lifted song and bended knee; But now our thanks are chiefly pour'd For those who taught us to be free. The Unitarian minister at Salem, James Flint, prayed for a deeper freedom in his poem ‘Celebration of American Independence’: Freedom, then, by right of birth, Teach us, Lord, to prize the worth Of that richest gem of earth, Freedom of the mind. The health of the nation was reflected in its inner soul, and in its political composition: John Quincy Adams, President from 1824 to 1829, wrote sacred poems and hymns. The result was a pride in the country, and a sense that it was ‘under God’, so that William Rouseville Alger, a Unitarian minister in Boston, prayed to ‘our fathers' God’ from the Atlantic to the Pacific— To smile on all o'er which our banner waves— The busy mart, the deck, the prairie sod, Old Plymouth roofs, new San Francisco graves. It was because of this pride in freedom and its attendant responsibilities that American sacred poetry had such a strong inclination to inculcate civic righteousness, based on the highest ideals of human behaviour. As late as 1889, a book entitled Psalms of the West attempted to give expression to these aspirations: Methought I saw a nation arise in the world, and the strength thereof was the strength of God; And her bulwarks were noble spirits and ready arms, and her war was in the cause of all mankind; . . . And every child was trained in the beauty of a clear spirit and an open mind, and in the use of reason rightly, and in living for the ideal good; . . .598

598

Psalm LXXVIII. Hymns spread quickly across America in the nineteenth century. A certain Frederic M. Bird, writing from what he called ‘these western wilds’ of Iowa City in 1878 to John Ellerton had a library of 2,300 volumes of hymnody (Henry Housman, John Ellerton . . . on Hymnody (London, 1896), 171).

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This Whitmanesque vision of hope and new life helps to explain why Unitarianism was such a strong religion in New England: through its hymns it also had a pervasive effect on other churches in other parts of America.

High Moral Tone Philip Schaff emigrated to the United States as a young man in 1844. Ten years later, he published America: A Sketch of Its Political, Social, and Religious Character, in which he described the moral, yet Puritanical earnestness of the American character, its patriotism and noble love of liberty in connection with deep-rooted reverence for the law of God and authority, its clear, practical understanding, its talent for organization, its inclination for improvement in every sphere, its fresh enthusiasm for great plans and schemes of moral reform, and its willingness to make sacrifices for the promotion of God's kingdom and every good work.599 Some of these qualities may be seen in one of the first American hymns of the nineteenth century to have survived in modern books, Ray Palmer's ‘My faith looks up to Thee’, published in Lowell Mason's Spritual Songs for Social Worship in 1831. The stanza form, with its increase from two rhyming lines to three, and its nicely placed short lines, is probably the main reason why Palmer's rather ordinary poetic language seems effective: May Thy rich grace impart Strength to my fainting heart, My zeal inspire; As Thou hast died for me, O may my love to Thee Pure, warm, and changeless be, A living fire. In addition to the stanza form, there is something else, a prayerful earnestness, which compensates for the artless phraseology (it is found also in Palmer's translations, which include ‘Jesu, thou joy of loving hearts’, and his popular sacramental hymn, ‘O bread to pilgrims given’). Its plainness and seriousness are qualities that are found in abundance in early nineteenth-century American hymnody, some of which seems to have been written by a succession of highminded Emersonians, including Emerson himself. His Unitarian colleagues were particularly notable for producing hymns that reflect what one of them, George W. Briggs, described as ‘the most fervent expressions of a profound spiritual life’.600 The most

599

Quoted in George C. Bedell, Leo Sandon, Jr., Charles T. Wellborn (eds), Religion in America (2nd edn., New York, 1982), 52.

600

Preface to his Hymns for Public Worship (Boston, 1845); quoted in Benson, The English Hymn, 463.

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distinguished of them were Samuel Johnson and Samuel Longfellow, who published A Book of Hymns for Public and Private Devotion in 1846, and Hymns of the Spirit in 1864. Johnson's hymn, ‘The church the City of God’, from the second of these, is astonishing in its sustained gravitas, the heavy syllables settling into a powerful iambic rhythm after the initial trochee: City of God, how broad and far Outspread thy walls sublime! The true thy chartered freemen are Of every age and clime: The concept of chartered freemen is impressive, and so are the sublime walls: but the total sense of grandeur comes (unusually) from the adverbs and adjectives. They are equally important in verse 2, where the rhetoric is obvious but effective in this heavy context: One One One One

holy Church, one army strong, steadfast, high intent; working band, one harvest-song, King omnipotent.

‘Strong’, ‘steadfast’, ‘high’; these build up, through the six ‘one’s, to the emphatic ‘omnipotent’: Johnson has loaded the Common Metre stanza with phrase after phrase, and in the next stanza he turns back to the ‘how broad and far’ figure of line 1, in order to celebrate freedom once again: How purely hath thy speech come down From man's primeval youth! How grandly hath thine empire grown Of freedom, love, and truth! Adjectives and adverbs are again unusually important—‘purely’, ‘grandly’, ‘primeval’; and in the next verse ‘neverfainting’, ‘serene and bright’, ‘dawning’: How gleam thy watch-fires through the night With never-fainting ray! How rise thy towers, serene and bright, To meet the dawning day! The repeated ‘how’s of these verses are exclamations of awe and wonder, which turns to assertion in the final verse, with obvious rhetorical repetitions again: In vain the surge's angry shock, In vain the drifting sands: Unharmed upon the eternal Rock The eternal city stands.

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The city ‘stands’, which is all it has to do: into that last word is concentrated much of the weight that has accumulated throughout the five stanzas. It is the final statement of firmness, of the immovable and impregnable city of God, and its diction and construction are precisely organized to that end. Johnson's hymn may be contrasted with his colleague Samuel Long-fellow's ‘Holy Spirit, Truth divine’, which prays for various aspects of the Holy Spirit to come, and in so doing creates a hymn of inward movement: Holy Spirit, Truth divine, Dawn upon this soul of mine! Word of God and inward Light, Wake my spirit, clear my sight. The three verbs clearly give the impression of activity, and in contrast to Johnson's ‘stands’ the final verse of Longfellow's hymn is one of gushing water in the desert: Holy Spirit, Joy divine, Gladden thou this heart of mine! In the desert ways I sing— ‘Spring, O Well, for ever spring!’ Longfellow's technique is as appropriate for the effect he desires to produce as Johnson's is, although the effect is very different. The moral purpose is plain. It is found again in the work of Lydia Huntley Sigourney, probably the most popular poet in America before the Civil War. Even in pain and suffering (her son Andrew died of consumption aged 19601) her refrain in one hymn is ‘hope for good!’, and her consolation is that, in every situation, ‘Jesus of Nazareth passeth by’. The imagery of the final verse is taken directly from the experience of a tuberculous illness in its final stages: Fading one, with the hectic streak, With thy vein of fire, and thy burning cheek, Fear'st thou to tread the darken'd vale, Look unto One who can never fail. He hath trod it Himself, He will hear thy sigh, ‘Jesus of Nazareth passeth by’.602 For Sigourney, ‘Prayer is the dew of faith’, which keeps it ‘A bright perennial evergreen’, and which enables ‘Good works, of faith the fruit’ to ripen, year by year. In our life on earth, as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow put it, we leave ‘Footprints in the sands of time’; we are also builders of the soul, who need to do the job properly, with no skimping of the bits that

601

See L. H. Sigourney, The Faded Hope (London, 1852).

602

Compare The Faded Hope, 162: ‘The access of the hectic fever began to assume a fearful regularity. . . The burning rose on the cheek.’

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other people do not see. In ‘The Builders’ he described the business of constructing our own house of life: For the structure that we raise, Time is with materials fill'd; Our to-days and yesterdays Are the blocks with which we build. If we build properly, we can ascend without fear to the upper storey, where from the turrets the eye Sees the world as one vast plain And one boundless reach of sky. Although his work (including ‘The Psalm of Life’) appears in Lyra Sacra Americana,603 Longfellow was more of a moralist than a hymn-writer. His brother Samuel may be seen as more a hymn-writer than a moralist, but the line in this Unitarian hymnody is often hard to draw, so much so that W. Garrett Horder, who did as much as anyone to popularize American hymnody in Britain, suggested (not just about American hymns, however) that ‘hymns are regarded less and less as the media for the expression of theological opinion, and more and more as the expression of religious feelings—feelings common to believers in every church’.604 Horder argued that There must be that indescribable element we call poetic, proceeding from ‘the vision and the faculty divine’, to render verses, though metrically faultless, a hymn.605 The phrase comes from Wordsworth, a writer of whom Horder was very fond (he entitled one of his books ‘Intimations of Immortality’); the influence of Wordsworth is visible in much American hymnody of the nineteenth century—in its appreciation of nature, its attention to morality, and its prophetic tone. These qualities are found consistently in the work of the Unitarians such as Oliver Wendell Holmes, who is close to Johnson in his grave and impressive seriousness, using the octosyllabic couplets with strong caesuras and emphasizing the rhymes, which bind the lines together strongly: Lord of all being, throned afar, Thy glory flames from sun and star; Centre and soul of every sphere, Yet to each loving heart how near!

603

Lyra Sacra Americana, ed. Charles Dexter Cleveland (London, 1868). Cleveland was United States Consul at Cardiff, 1861–4, and he compiled the collection because he was surprised ‘how little is generally known of the wealth that exists in American Sacred Lyric Poetry’ (‘Preface’, p. iii).

604

W. Garrett Horder, The Hymn Lover (London, 1889), 496. Horder's excellent book contains a fine chapter on American hymns.

605

Ibid. 493.

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The weak inversion of the final line is to some extent excused by the element of surprise which is permitted in the last two words, following the cosmic imagery of the first three lines. The poem then changes to a decorous exchange between sun and star, day and night: Sun of our life, thy quickening ray Sheds on our path the glow of day; Star of our hope, thy softened light Cheers the long watches of the night. Holmes then develops the metaphors one stage further. If the sun is the sun of life, and the star is the star of hope, then all times and all natural phenomena speak meaningfully of God and his purposes: Our midnight is thy smile withdrawn, Our noontide is thy gracious dawn, Our rainbow arch, thy mercy's sign; All, save the clouds of sin, are thine. The reflective couplets change here to reflective single lines, which allow Holmes to make some simple but strong distinctions between darkness and light, gracious mercy and sin. The contrasts are part of a life-view in which there are no grey areas, and human beings have to choose, as they do in James Russell Lowell's poem, ‘for the good or evil side’. This does not prevent a serious enjoyment of life, in the beauty of nature or the company of friends; the urbane qualities of Holmes's The Professor at the Breakfast Table are present also in his hymn for the reunion of his class at Harvard in 1869, not long after the end of the Civil War: Thou gracious Power, whose mercy lends The light of home, the smile of friends, Our gathered flock thine arms enfold As in the peaceful days of old. Wilt thou not hear us while we raise In sweet accord of solemn praise The voices that have mingled long In joyous flow of mirth and song? In this hymnody of moral endeavour, events such as the Incarnation become exempla rather than mysteries. F. L. Hosmer's Christmas hymn, ‘Today be joy in every heart’ uses the message of the angels to indicate the way forward for mankind: ‘Peace on the earth, goodwill to men!’ Before us goes the star, That leads us on to holier births And life diviner far.

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It is this version of the Incarnation as a time of peace that informs Edmund H. Sears's ‘It came upon the midnight clear’, written in 1849, which sees the message of the angels as a counter to the strife of a weary and war-torn world. The angels fly through the air, touching their harps of gold, bending over the earth with their song. But Beneath the angel-strain have rolled Two thousand years of wrong. Sears invites the singer to ‘rest beside the weary road’ and listen to the angels: for reasons that are not clear, he believes that the tide of history is about to change, and the age of gold is about to return. The Incarnation thus becomes a signal for a new turn of events: For lo! the days are hastening on, By prophet-bards foretold, When, with the ever-circling years, Comes round the age of gold; When peace shall over all the earth Its ancient splendours fling, And the whole world send back the song Which now the angels sing. The impressive panorama of the angels cleaving the sky gives way to the grand historical gesture, which has survived, like some piece of monumental sculpture, through a century and a half which has consistently proved Sears to be wrong. It is hard to account for this, except in terms of some vague hope which it is good to express at Christmas time. It is found, more delicately and skilfully, in Phillip Brooks's ‘O little town of Bethlehem’, written some twenty years later (in 1868). Part of the delicacy comes from the decision to use the internal rhyme in the third and seventh lines of each verse, but it is also connected with the poise with which Brooks preserves a delicate balance between the scene itself, the little town with its dark streets where the light of the world is shining, and the meaning: O holy Child of Bethlehem Descend to us, we pray: Cast out our sin, and enter in, Be born in us to-day. Brooks skilfully brings the reader from contemplation of the scene itself to an awareness of its meaning for the individual believer. He begins the third verse with a magical repetition: How silently, how silently, The wondrous gift is given! So God imparts to human hearts The blessings of his heaven.

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No ear may hear his coming; But in this world of sin, Where meek souls will receive him, still The dear Christ enters in. The transition is managed with consummate skill: from the silence of the night and the mystery of the Incarnation to the reception of Christ by the meek soul is a step which Brooks achieves by recalling the singer to ‘this world of sin’, in which there are meek souls, but there is also sin and misery: Where charity stands watching, And faith holds wide the door, The dark night wakes, the glory breaks, And Christmas comes once more. Brooks knows that ‘Misery cries out to Thee’, and his Christmas hymn is a hope that the situation will change, that through the coming of Christ and the spread of Christian values, society will become better. That hope must be the aim of all people of goodwill, and it becomes a part of that unmystical and high-minded morality that is a major feature of American hymn-writing at this time. It reaches its finest form in J. W. Chadwick's noble pentameters, written during the Civil War for the Graduating Class of the Divinity School at Cambridge in June 1864. Chadwick boldly sails into the expansive vision: Eternal Ruler of the ceaseless round Of circling planets singing on their way; Guide of the nations from the night profound Into the glory of the perfect day;— The third verse is particularly grand in its celebration of the Unitarian vision of freedom, love, and truth, in a stately repetition of ‘one . . . One’: We would be one in hatred of all wrong, One in our love of all things sweet and fair; One with the joy that breaketh into song, One with the grief that trembleth into prayer; One in the power that makes thy children free To follow truth, and thus to follow thee. The frame of mind which wrote these lines and made them widely acceptable was described by Alfred P. Putnam in his anthology of Unitarian hymnody, Singers and Songs of the Liberal Faith: a strong faith and tender trust in God the Father; a fine appreciation and love of all that is grand and beautiful in Nature; a deep conviction that a divine hand is in all things, and is guiding all things on to a glorious issue and end; a profound and earnest reverence for Christ, as the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and a heartfelt

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recognition of his Cross as the emblem and pledge of victory; a genuine ‘enthusiasm for humanity’ and a sense of the supreme value of a good life, and a large and genial sympathy and fellowship with all true and faithful souls in every sect or communion,—606 This not only summarizes much of the nobility of mind and character which is found in these mainly Unitarian hymns; it also helps to explain Sears's optimism, for ‘It came upon the midnight clear’ is a poetic expression of the belief that ‘a divine hand is in all things, and is guiding all things on to a glorious issue and end’.

Nature Putnam's insertion of ‘a fine appreciation and love of all that is grand and beautiful in Nature’ is another quality which marks out nineteenth-century American hymn-writing. English hymn-writers had not been averse to writing about nature—Cowper did so very beautifully—but not since Addison and Watts had hymn-writers incorporated the grandeur and beauty of the natural world into their hymnody. It almost seems as if the encounter with the great American landscape, its sheer scale and size, inspired writers to use images drawn from magnificent natural effects. Harriet Beecher Stowe writes of the purple morning; Whittier of mountain ranges; Lydia Sigourney of prayers as raindrops. Samuel Longfellow's ‘Vesper Hymn’ describes the sunset glory and then the stars coming out: Telling still the ancient story, Their Creator's changeless love. The language switches from the literal to the metaphorical, as it does in Holmes's ‘Lord of all being’ (‘Our rainbow arch, thy mercy's sign’). Longfellow uses the darkness and the stars as images of the life of the spirit: As the darkness deepens o'er us, Lo, eternal stars arise; Hope and faith and love rise glorious, Shining in the Spirit's skies. In the American hymn of the nineteenth century, the spectacular landscape suggests grandeur. Eliza Scudder, for example, wrote a hymn on ‘The Love of God’ which begins with a shoreless sea and dizzy heights: Thou Grace Divine, encircling all, A shoreless, boundless sea, Wherein at last our souls must fall; O Love of God most free,

606

Alfred P. Putnam, ‘Preface’, Singers and Songs of the Liberal Faith (Boston, 1875), pp. ix–x.

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When over dizzy heights we go, A soft hand binds our eyes, And we are guided safe and slow; O Love of God most wise. The sense of the love of God in and around the landscape, indeed embodied in its majesty and vastness, is found again and again. William Peabody, the Unitarian minister at Springfield, Mass., wrote a ‘Hymn of Nature’ beginning: God of the earth's extended plains! The dark, green fields contented lie: The mountains rise like holy towers, Where man might commune with the sky; The tall cliff challenges the storm That lowers upon the vale below, Where shaded fountains send their streams, With joyous music in their flow. Subsequent verses deal with God of the sea, the forest, the air, the sky, and the stars. Peabody's harmless but trite animation of nature—the contented fields, the challenging cliffs—is one step towards the figural use of the natural world in the service of religion, as in Samuel F. Smith's ‘Success of the Gospel’: Rich dews of grace come o'er us, In many a gentle shower, And brighter scenes before us Are opening every hour: Each cry, to heaven going, Abundant answers brings, And heavenly gales are blowing With peace upon their wings. In the same strain, John Greenleaf Whittier takes up Coleridge's idea (in ‘The Aeolian Harp’) of all of animated nature as an organic harp given life and music by the breath of God: The Has The Has

harp at Nature's advent strung never ceased to play; song the stars of morning sung never died away.

And prayer is made, and praise is given, By all things near and far: The ocean looketh up to heaven And mirrors every star; The green earth sends her incense up From many a mountain shrine;—

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God is in the air, the sky, and the sea: he is also to be found in the earth and its flowers, in Lucy Larcom's springtime poem, ‘Our Christ’: In Christ I feel the heart of God Throbbing from heaven through earth; Life stirs again within the clod, Renewed in beauteous birth; The soul springs up, a flower of prayer, Breathing his breath out on the air. The idea of nature as instinctively worshipping is part of the process by which the natural leads to the ineffable. William Cullen Bryant's hymn for the opening of a church, published in 1864, begins: Thou whose unmeasured temple stands Built over earth and sea,— and the majesty of the American landscape led to an intuitive sense of the vastness and power of God, the greatness of his power as a Creator and the unimaginable wonder of his presence.

Slavery and the Civil War It was precisely this concept of a beautiful land, rich with natural wonders, that sharpened the sense of society and its imperfections. William Cullen Bryant's hymn for Home Missions deftly united heaven, the natural world, and human failure: Look from thy sphere of endless day, O God of mercy and of might; In pity look on those who stray Benighted, in this land of light. There were many reasons why the contrast between the ideal (this land of light) and the actual (those who stray benighted) should have preoccupied the American mind. Some of them are found in the fiction of Hawthorne, with its brooding examination of New England societies at different times, or in Melville's interest in goodness opposed to the darkness of the human heart. The most immediate and obvious problem, to most northern American Christians, was slavery. As early as 1845, James Russell Lowell wrote the poem ‘When a deed is done for freedom’ against the Mexican War and its aim of acquiring the slave-holding state of Texas, which W. Garrett Horder, an indefatigable advocate of American hymnody, later turned into a resounding hymn: Once to every man and nation Comes the moment to decide,—

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and Samuel Longfellow wrote a hymn in 1856 for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the American Anti-Slavery Society entitled ‘Watchman, what of the night?’. Whittier's ironically titled ‘The Sabbath Scene’ described a fugitive slave being recaptured in a church, and juxtaposes the scene with the concept of the natural world: ‘Is this’, I cried, ‘The end of prayer and preaching? Then down with pulpit, down with priest, And give us nature's teaching!’ The irreconcilable positions of Northern and Southern Christian ideologies and politics met in the Civil War, which brought out all the militant imagery of the Northern church. Arthur Cleveland Coxe, who was a bishop of the Episcopal Church, wrote ‘Watchwords’, subtitled ‘A Hymn for the Times’, which begins stirringly: We are living—we are dwelling In a grand and awful time; In an age, on ages telling, To be living is sublime. The portentous and incoherent repetitions of the first three lines give way to the grand gesture of line 4. The hymn turns out to be a challenge: Hark! the onset! will ye fold your Faith-clad arms in lazy lock? Up, O up, thou drowsy soldier! Worlds are charging to the shock. The bishop's admonitions sound hortatory and hollow, the pompous exhortations of a non-combatant, but they were widely printed and are clearly an example of the Churches' support for the war. So when Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote ‘A Prayer during War’ and an ‘Army Hymn’, he saw the war as a crusade: God of all nations! Sovereign Lord! In Thy dread name we draw the sword; We lift the starry flag on high That fills with light our stormy sky. No more its flaming emblems wave To bar from hope the trembling slave; No more its radiant glories shine To blast with woe a child of Thine. The images refer back to the nation through the flag (just as Julia Ward Howe wrote ‘The Flag’ after the second battle of Bull Run): the concept of freedom takes on a new urgency. So a popular American anthology, Hymns

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of the Ages, started in 1861, began its third series, 1864, with a long section ‘In time of war’, beginning with ‘Old and New’: For still the new transcends the old, In signs and wonders manifold: Slaves rise up men; the olive waves With roots deep set in battle graves. It was this great national crisis which gave rise to the most celebrated of all American hymns, Julia Ward Howe's ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’, written in November 1861. Its force comes partly from its pulsing rhythm, based on the tune of ‘John Brown's body’, but more securely from the way in which it gathers up into itself so many of the ideas which fuelled the energies of nineteenth-century America—freedom, a high moral tone, a concept of a nation under God with a duty to perform. It is made very clear that this is America that we are singing about, for Christ was born across the sea: In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea, With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me: As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free, While God is marching on. The ubiquitous word ‘free’ is here found again: in its original appearance, it clearly refers to the emancipation of slavery, but it is a text that has been reappropriated by subsequent generations in many different ways. ‘To make men free’ could refer to almost anything—imprisonment and slavery, but also superstition and tyranny, and also selfishness. It has been used whenever there has been a need to raise national fervour, or to enlist support for a cause. Latent in the imagery is an extraordinary violence: Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord: He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored; He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword: His truth is marching on. The verse begins with a glorious coming, but the second two lines turn that coming into a ‘trampling’ of the vintage that is a harvest of wrath: ‘the grapes of wrath’ is a powerful and terrifying image (as John Steinbeck clearly understood) for it suggests a wine-harvest—that a society has to drink the results of its own vine-culture. This God is a God of lightning, with a terrible sword, who is ‘sifting out the hearts of men before His judgement-seat’; and in the verse that is sometimes omitted, the idea of vengeance is clearly articulated in imagery of fire, steel, and crushing: I have read a fiery gospel, writ in burnished rows of steel; As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal: Let the hero born of woman crush the serpent with his heel; Since God is marching on.

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The sheer zest of this hymn obscures its total commitment to war: Julia Ward Howe's lines anchor the gospel of the coming of the kingdom to the troop review that she had just witnessed (from which come the burnished rows of steel, presumably the rifles or cannons of the Union regiments). He comes with a trumpet call: He hath sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;— and as he marches on there is trampling and crushing underfoot. The rapidity of the four-beat line has a tremendous momentum: the hymn was written at great speed, in the November dawn after the troop review, and its images contain an almost frenzied desire to overrun and destroy (‘O be swift, my soul, to answer Him; be jubilant my feet!’). Into this landscape of speed and violence comes the startling and beautiful contrast of In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea, With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me:— which wonderfully complicates the hymn by linking the battle to the transfiguring power of the Incarnation, and then to the Passion: As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,— The neat parallel focuses the battle hymn's ideology: the Union cause—and, in successive interpretations, any ‘fight for freedom’—is the human response to the original divine action. If God in Christ died for humanity, let humanity fight for the world which He would have wanted, even if it means invoking an idea of God which is terrifying (though with proper biblical precedents, because Howe's images are drawn from the Old Testament and from Revelation). It is an extreme example of the American culture of freedom and morality, faced with a crisis that needed to be fought through: to that extent, its martial violence becomes part of a necessary process, a recognition of duty. The hymn is therefore startling in its imagery of war (it is, after all, a ‘Battle Hymn’) but also brave in its authenticity.

Reappropriation ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ is unique in its sublime force. It is also a remarkable piece of substitution: it was Howe's minister, James Freeman Clarke, who suggested on the way back from the troop review that she might write new words to ‘John Brown's body’.607 The writing of new words to old tunes or old themes was a necessary part of the American hymn-writing experience, beginning with Timothy Dwight's rewriting of the metrical psalms, and continuing with new themes to old metres, or in response to old words. This is the same language, used in a new country.

607

See Julia Ward Howe, Reminiscences, 1819–1899 (Boston and New York, 1900), 274–5.

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Sometimes the ‘newness’ is minimal, as in the case of the first two hymns to cross the Atlantic back into English hymnbooks, George Washington Doane's ‘Thou art the way’ and Charles William Everest's ‘Take up thy cross’.608 Both are strong and sensible hymns, with a firm structure, better than many English hymns of the same period because they keep their eye on the object and are not distracted by competing ideologies or an over-the-shoulder look at an increasingly secular society. At other times, the newness of American hymnody is unmistakable, either through the almost indulgent use of natural imagery by Harriet Beecher Stowe: Still, still with Thee, when purple morning breaketh, When the bird waketh, and the shadows flee; Fairer than morning, lovelier than daylight, Dawns the sweet consciousness, I am with Thee. or through the actual decision to rewrite an English hymn, as Stowe does with ‘Abide with me’. Her hymn ‘That mystic Word of Thine, O sovereign Lord’ is Lyte's hymn transported to America but also taken across the gender line, so that it begins (like Dora Greenwell's ‘I am not skilled to understand’) with a recognition of inadequacy that is not found in hymns by men: That mystic Word of Thine, O sovereign Lord, Is all too pure, too high, too deep for me; Weary of striving, and with longing faint, I breathe it back again in prayer to Thee! Having acknowledged this inadequacy, Stowe can then turn to her refashioning of Lyte: Abide in me, I pray, and I in Thee! From this good hour, O leave me never more! Then shall the discord cease, the wound be healed, The life-long bleeding of the soul be o'er. The imagery of life-long bleeding is revealing, not only because it sees the progress of the soul in terms of menstruation (perhaps with a reminiscence of the woman with an issue of blood in Mark 5), but also because it suggests an openness and vulnerability that is not found in Lyte's more reticent text. Stowe is an enthusiast in prayer: Abide in me: o'ershadow by Thy love Each half-formed purpose, and dark thought of sin;

608

‘Thou art the way’, published in Doane's Songs by the Way in 1824, came into English hymn-books very quickly. Edward Bickersteth included it in his Christian Psalmody in 1833, and it appeared also (much altered) in W. J. Hall's Psalms and Hymns adapted to the Services of the Church of England (1836) —commonly known as ‘The Mitre HymnBook’, because of the mitre on the front cover.

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Quench, ere it rise, each selfish, low desire, And keep my soul, as Thine, calm and divine. The intensity (not helped by the undisciplined rhyme) is increased by the elaborate simile of the next verse: As some rare perfume in a vase of clay Pervades it with a fragrance not its own, So, when Thou dwellest in a mortal soul, All heaven's own sweetness seems around it thrown. In another image, the soul goes out of tune: The soul alone, like a neglected harp, Grows out of tune, and needs a hand divine; Dwell Thou within it, tune and touch the chords, Till every note and string shall answer Thine. Stowe, like Whittier after her, is pushing out the boundaries of hymn-writing, including within it those fleeting impressions of loveliness and goodness, signified by images of fragrance and enchantment. Lyte has his sea imagery, but his expression of the need for Christ is tense and concentrated in comparison with Stowe's record of experience: Abide in me: there have been moments blest When I have heard Thy voice and felt Thy power, Then evil lost its grasp, and passion, hushed, Owned the divine enchantment of the hour. Stowe's position as a woman, and her sensitive awareness of the ebb and flow of rich experience, are two reasons why her hymnody is distinctive, and why she needed to write in a new way, even if it meant rewriting one of the finest hymns in the language. In so doing, she was departing from the tradition of English hymnody (as Doane and Everest, for example, were not).609Uncle Tom's Cabin, in which the dying slave quotes Watts, shows that she knew the traditional hymns, but her own seem to have an inner compulsion to be different. This need is seen also in the poetry of Whittier. Whittier did not write hymns, with the possible exception of ‘My Psalm’, which is too long for worship. He wrote poems, which have been quarried for hymns.610 The enduring popularity of his work derives from a very unusual combination of imagery and rhythm, which gives his work an instantly recognizable quality, that of an individual voice. At the same time, it contains qualities that we have come to recognize as central to American hymnody: a high moral purpose, a love of nature, and a certain

609

Stowe thought little of English preaching. ‘Oh for half-an-hour of my brother Henry’ was her verdict during a visit to London (referring to her brother, the Revd Henry Ward Beecher).

610

See Erik Routley, ‘Ought we to sing Whittier?’, Bulletin of the Hymn Society, 139 (May 1977), 221–7.

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unbounded-ness, so that Whittier is the supreme American poet of the love of God, ‘for ever flowing free’. This is a love which mysteriously permeates earth, sky, and sea: And so beside the Silent Sea I wait the muffled oar; No harm from Him can come to me On ocean or on shore. I know not where His islands lift Their fronded palms in air; I only know I cannot drift Beyond His love and care. The mysterious geography suggests a waiting for death (‘the muffled oar’) in a tranquillity of mind (the important word is ‘drift’) that is ready to be transported to any country (‘His islands’) without question or protest. Indeed, in contrast to his political engagement as a polemical journalist, Whittier's poetry celebrates quietness: he firmly rejects argument and ritual. ‘The Eternal Goodness’, from which these two verses are taken, acknowledges the firm doctrines of his friends, but politely declines to subscribe to them: I trace your lines of argument; Your logic linked and strong I weigh as one who dreads dissent, And fears a doubt as wrong. But still my human hands are weak To hold your iron creeds: Against the words ye bid me speak My heart within me pleads. This quietness of mind does not excuse Whittier from the vicissitudes of life, as he readily acknowledges: I see the wrong that round me lies, I feel the guilt within; I hear, with groan and travail cries, The world confess its sin. Yet, in the maddening maze of things, And tossed by storm and flood, To one fixed stake my spirit clings; I know that God is good! The simplicity of these stanzas, the absence of any attempt at rhetorical persuasion, mark out Whittier's work as unusual, and are of a piece with his directness of mind. He tends to refuse all the common tricks of repetition and patterning, and presents, it would seem, a simple Quaker's gospel:

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Our Friend, our Brother, and our Lord, What may thy service be?— Nor name, nor form, nor ritual word, But simply following Thee. Poetically, that gospel is made interesting in a number of ways. The first is that of apt allusion: And not for signs in heaven above Or earth below they look, Who know with John his smile of love, With Peter his rebuke. The biblical references here draw attention to the humanity of Jesus's contact with his disciples and the application of these moments to our own relationship with him. It is part of the startling directness of some of Whittier's work: But warm, sweet, tender, even yet A present help is he; And faith has still its Olivet, And love its Galilee. The adjectives in the first line are astonishingly daring, but before the verse becomes too sentimental, the reader is pulled back to specific moments in the Bible—God as a very present help in trouble, the agony in the garden, the disciples and their master in Galilee. Whittier's hymns work in such unexpected juxtapositions: verse follows verse in apparently random order, often in groups of two or three, but each one sharp with perception: Our thoughts lie open to thy sight, And, naked to thy glance, Our secret sins are in the light Of thy pure countenance. This is straightforward, if daunting: but then the oxymorons and paradoxes come flooding in: Thy Thy Thy Thy

healing pains, a keen distress tender light shines in; sweetness is the bitterness, grace the pang of sin.

In the burning light of such simplicity and quiet, our human endeavours to justify God seem (in a word that Whittier often uses, because it signifies something that he particularly dislikes) ‘noisy’: How vain, secure in all thou art, Our noisy championship!—

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The sighing of the contrite heart Is more than flattering lip. The message is that we must do the will of God, as unobtrusively as possible, with deeds and not words: To do thy will is more than praise, As words are less than deeds, And simple trust can find thy ways We miss with chart of creeds. It is ‘simple trust’ which is found in another poem against noise, the peculiar ‘The Brewing of Soma’,611 from which is taken Whittier's best-known hymn, ‘Dear Lord and Father of mankind’: In simple trust like theirs who heard Beside the Syrian sea The setting of Whittier's hymn to Parry's enchanting tune612 has given the lines an additional sweetness, with a repetition of the final line of each verse that allows it to sink deeper into the consciousness. In the original context of ‘The Brewing of Soma’, the first verse's prayer to ‘Forgive our foolish ways’ referred to specific forms of frantic and noisy Christian worship that Whittier abhorred; by detaching the last verses from the others (which happened in anthologies of sacred poetry very early in the poem's life) they are allowed to float freely, so that ‘our foolish ways’ becomes an indeterminate phrase signifying a general concept of human failure and sin. It can be personal or communal: Reclothe us in our rightful mind, In purer lives thy service find, In deeper reverence praise. The spirituality develops from forgiveness through the rightful mind, to become purer and deeper, and in such a state we recover the primitive simplicity of the first disciples, ‘Beside the Syrian sea’; and although that verse ends with a call to ‘Rise up and follow thee’, the ‘following’ is a form of quietness. Simple trust becomes a ceasing to strive (‘Till all our strivings cease’) and a removal of strain and stress so that ‘our ordered lives’ confess The beauty of thy peace. Order, beauty, peace: Whittier's hymn is probably as near as most people will ever get to the vita contemplativa, to patterns of prayer and meditation.

611

See ‘B. S. M.’ (Bernard S. Massey), ‘Dear Lord and Father’, Bulletin of the Hymn Society, 167 (April 1986), 122–6.

612

Adapted from his oratorio, Judith, and now called

REPTON

. See John Wilson, ‘ “Repton”—a coming centenary’, Bulletin of the Hymn Society, 172 (July 1987), 241–4.

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So the hymn, with its deepening repetition of the final line, comes to rest on the word ‘calm’: Speak through the earthquake, wind and fire, O still small voice of calm! Peace and calm: Whittier's hymn is at the opposite extreme to those hymns which urge action, exhort, demand. And yet his hymn is more than a piece of religious relaxation: it is a recalling (or rather a ‘reclothing’) to a rightful mind, a return to a relationship with God that is ‘in simple trust’. In ‘A Sabbath Scene’, Whittier echoes Wordsworth when he repudiates the church in which the slave is recaptured and cries ‘give us Nature's teaching!’ Whittier's hymns often follow closely the patterns of Wordsworthian experience, though with a more precise religious reference. In his preference for Nature over the corruptions of society, in his belief in a guiding power, in his sense of having been privileged and guided, and above all perhaps in his use of imagery, Whittier resembles Wordsworth. He is the poet of the journey of life in ‘My Psalm’: Enough that blessings undeserved Have mark'd my erring track: That wheresoe'er my feet have swerv'd, His chastening turn'd me back; which is reminiscent of Wordsworth's experience in Book I of The Prelude. Whittier is the poet of clear water and fresh air: That more and more a providence Of love is understood, Making the springs of time and sense Sweet with eternal good;— The eternal goodness (the title of one of Whittier's finest poems) is found in sweet springs; and as the rough edges are smoothed away, ‘slow rounding into calm’ (another favourite Whittier word), the sunshine, wind, and fresh air come flooding in: And so the shadows fall apart, And so the west winds play; And all the windows of my heart I open to the day. As Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, aptly and generously, Whittier's poems have ‘the morning air of a soul that breathes freely, and always the fragrance of a loving spirit’.613 That spirit links Whittier to earth as well as to heaven, in a sweetness of temper that values what he has:

613

Quoted in John B. Pickard, John Greenleaf Whittier (New York, 1961), 43.

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When on my day of life the night is falling, And, in the winds from unsunned spaces blown, I hear far voices out of darkness calling My feet to paths unknown, Thou who hast made my home of life so pleasant, Leave not its tenant when its walls decay; O Love Divine, O Helper ever present, Be Thou my strength and stay! Once again this is a reappropriation of Lyte (‘Help of the helpless, O abide with me!’), but Whittier's poem is, if similar in tone and mood, different in technique, pursuing metaphors such as the home of life (as in ‘My Psalm’, where the windows are opened), and allowing the reader to hear of some of the pleasant experiences of life. Whittier is too honest to go in for the traditional description of life as a weary pilgrimage: Be near me when all else is from me drifting— Earth, sky, home's pictures, days of shade and shine, And kindly faces to my own uplifting The love which answers mine. In the face of such happiness the future seems dark, especially as the poet claims that he has no place among the elect: No gate of pearl, no branch of palm I merit, Nor street of shining gold. He is determinedly original, rejecting all the expected patterns of heaven-imagery. Instead he asks for a peaceful settlement beside a river, like some heavenly figure in an American landscape: Some humble door among Thy many mansions, Some sheltering shade where sin and striving cease, And flows for ever through heaven's green expansions The river of Thy peace. The image of a tranquil settlement in New England is as clear in its way as Addison's ‘verdant pastures’, which seem to be imagined from Magdalen walks; and although in heaven there are many mansions, Whittier would prefer a more ordinary house, similar to the one he is about to leave. There he would learn a new song, and (like Stonewall Jackson) rest in the shade of the trees: There, from the music round about me stealing, I fain would learn the new and holy song, And find at last, beneath thy trees of healing, The life for which I long. In this last hymn, the traditional images of Christian experience and the biblical echoes blend with a particular kind of American experience. The

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result—in Stowe, and Whittier, and many of the others—is a new kind of hymnody, as if the well-used themes of European religious experience had been given a new life by being exposed to the newly independent country, with all its high morality, its seriousness, and its love of nature. Above all, hymn-writing was given a new zest by the testimony of individual experience rather than Church doctrine: this was part of the value placed upon freedom of worship and respect for the individual conscience. Not the least of its merits was that it produced a period of great hymn-writing, by men and women who brought to bear upon the central truths of the Christian gospel their own individual hopes and fears, emotions and understandings.

18 Different Traditions Sing it o'er, and o'er again In the eighteenth century, English hymns colonized American worship; in the nineteenth century, American hymns came across the Atlantic in the opposite direction to enrich the world of Victorian religion—at first singly (as the two hymns found in Hymns Ancient and Modern) and then in anthologies such as Charles Dexter Cleveland's Lyra Sacra Americana (1868) and W. Garrett Horder's Treasury of American Sacred Song (1896). The most spectacular irruption of an American phenomenon into the English tradition, however, was the publication of Ira D. Sankey's Sacred Songs and Solos in 1874, and the growing awareness of Afro-American spiritual songs through the Jubilee Singers and the publication of the texts of slave songs. These new additions entered English nineteenth-century hymnody at a time when it was multiplying at an astonishing rate, not only in the number of hymn-books, but also in the variety and richness of their content. It is not easy to do justice to the many-sided figure that is Victorian hymnody, and the present chapter will, of necessity, be something of an omnium gatherum. It will be concerned with gospel hymns, but also with some other aspects of nineteenth-century hymnody, with the world into which the gospel hymns came. Having discussed the burgeoning of Church of England hymnody, I turn first to some Nonconformists.

Repudiating the Enlightenment Sometime in the 1820s a young Congregationalist, Thomas Binney, later to be a celebrated minister, wrote a hymn, which came to him ‘while looking up at the sky, one brilliant star-light night’.614 It began Eternal Light! Eternal Light! Over forty years later a Jesuit novice wrote on a similar night:

614

Written on an autograph copy: see Richard Watson and Kenneth Trickett, Companion to Hymns and Psalms (Peterborough, 1988), 279.

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Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies! and saw the stars as enclosing the holiness of Christ, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and all the Saints in light: These are indeed the barn; withindoors house The shocks. This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows. Hopkins's language is wilfully difficult, but ringing with excitement. Binney's is more straightforward, but he is also celebrating light, and the presence of Christ, and contrasting it with the fallen state of those human beings who live in darkness. Hopkins regards the stars, and what they represent, as a purchase and a prize: Buy then! bid then!—What?—Prayer, patience, alms, vows. Binney's hymn had anticipated this by describing the distance between spirits in heaven and human beings on earth: The spirits that surround Thy throne May bear the burning bliss; But that is surely theirs alone, Since they have never, never known A fallen world like this. This is simpler than Hopkins, but rich with the sinewy dignity of a thoughtful mind, signalled especially by the word ‘surely’: Binney is allowing that word to carry its persuasive sense into the verse. And as Hopkins finds ways to obtain the prize of Christ, housed within the brilliant stars, so Binney searches for the sublime: There is a way for man to rise To that sublime abode: An offering and a sacrifice, A Holy Spirit's energies, An Advocate with God— These are the equivalents of Hopkins's ‘Prayer, patience, alms, vows’: as his poem is rich with the practice of Jesuit devotion, so Binney's very precise hymn is full of the works of God—offering and sacrifice (which could be divine or human, but is probably here divine, referring to the words of the Holy Communion—‘by his one oblation of himself once offered’); the Holy Spirit's energies (a wonderful word, again suggesting divine or human energies); and the advocate with God, who is Jesus Christ. It is more hymnic in expression than Hopkins, and in that sense it lacks his wonderful ‘newness’, but its very simplicity and lucidity is a triumph of decorum, a complex statement rendered singable and comprehensible. The clever stanza-form, for example, encourages exactly the units of sense which

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Binney requires: the mind registers the unrhymed word at the end of line two, and comes upon it with relief at the end of line five. Within it, the vocabulary is exact: even the word ‘the’ is made important in the final lines of verse 5: These, these prepare us for the sight Of holiness above: The sons of ignorance and night May dwell in the eternal Light, Through the eternal Love! This is the eternal love, the unmistakable means by which we reach the purity of the eternal light. It is wonderfully intuitive: in Donald Davie's words, ‘it repudiates the belief and aspiration of the Enlightenment’.615 Davie, who admired this hymn and wrote a graceful tribute to it, would, I think, have seen most of the hymns to be discussed in this chapter as repudiating the Enlightenment, most obviously the gospel hymns of the Revival movements, but also the children's hymns. I have used his phrase because the hymns to be discussed in this chapter were all concerned in different ways with escaping from the philosophical and critical endeavours which followed the Enlightenment—the Higher Criticism and the Tübingen school under Ferdinand Christian Baur; the interest in geology, and natural history; and the development of a mass society, urban and nomadic, lacking a sense of community. In the face of these problems, the Church of England hymn-writers retreated into hymns for the Church, and the Revivalists concentrated on writing for the individual; and there are odd exceptions, such as Thomas Toke Lynch's The Rivulet, which sought to engage with a post-Wordsworthian interest in nature. I shall discuss Lynch first, since he was a Congregationalist and The Rivulet controversy involved Thomas Binney; then ‘the Gospel call’ hymns of the American revivalists, and the AfroAmerican spiritual songs; and finally, two independent elements of nineteenth-century hymnody, Scottish hymns and children's hymns.

The Rivulet Controversy In 1855 a Congregationalist minister, Thomas Toke Lynch, published The Rivulet, or Hymns for Heart and Voice. It contained hymns that are still sung to-day, such as ‘Gracious Spirit, dwell with me’ and ‘Dismiss me not thy service, Lord’. The chief characteristic of Lynch's work, however, was its attachment to nature, so that Flowers will not cease to speak, And tell the praise of God—

615

Donald Davie, Dissentient Voice (Notre Dame, Ind. and London, 1982), 41.


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and, predictably following— Birds will not refuse to sing The summer woods among,— Lynch had a gentle and delicate ear, and a love of nature, which he applied to his religious condition in a way that was intended to be helpful: I walked on sands beside the sea, And heard its ever-pulsing heart; And mine was moved with sympathy, Desiring of such strength a part: Thou restest not, nor needest rest, O sea; while I who love thee yet Remain so weak, and at the best Am but a wish and a regret. The moon with glory filled the air, With holy lustre every calm, And all my thoughts in silence were Of fleeting good and frequent harm: Yet happy with a heart so tired Beside the moony waves to stand; I saw the good that I desired, Clear as my shadow on the sand. I did not long to go to rest, I longed for rest to come to me, And said ‘Lord, oh, that I were blest With strength and with serenity; A heart as subject to thy will, And lighted with as calm a light, As waves which now the harbour fill, And lift their crests so purely bright.’ What is remarkable about this is not the verse itself, which is thin in content but harmless enough, but the row which it caused. It was first favourably reviewed: ‘As the rivulet refreshes the thirsty, brings music to his ear, and cheers him by the gladness of its onward flow, so will this charming volume refresh and delight the heart of the Christian.’616 But it had touched a raw nerve in a Church that was frightened by the intellectual movements of the time. The Rivulet, said James Grant in the Morning Advertiser, was ‘pervaded throughout by the Rationalist Theology of Germany’. It was further attacked by John Campbell, the editor of the Congregationalist British Banner and Christian Witness. Campbell saw editors as ‘God's ploughmen’, and armed with a sense of his own righteousness he described Lynch's work as ‘deliberately contradicting the Word of God’ and ‘most miserable garbage’.

616

Eclectic Review (Jan. 1856), 86.

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The hymns were ‘crude, disjointed, unmeaning, unchristian, ill-rhymed rubbish’.617 The point of quoting such uncharitable and vulgar abuse is to show how fierce the arguments about hymns could become, and how severe were the constraints upon hymn-writers at this time, especially in the Nonconformist churches. Comfortably within the fold of the Church of England, the Right Reverend hymn-writers could adjust their writings to Saints' Days and the Book of Common Prayer, so that their hymns reflected a divide between the Church and the world; in other churches, the awareness of the growing secularism of society, of the discoveries of science, and of German theological thought, made their influential members defensive. And as Bishop How burned Thomas Hardy's novel, so John Campbell used the burning metaphor to boast of editing out German theology from Congregationalist magazines, in order that their readers could feel safe: While the Magazines were under his care they need fear nothing from Germany. He discarded all such speculations. He had burned, he might say, reams of a speculative nature. He had dropped anchor in Westminster, where he found matter in abundance, in the Confession of Faith, in the Shorter and Larger Catechisms618— Campbell was thinking back to the great days of Old Dissent and the Westminster Confession; but the image of bookburning is sinister and authoritarian. It was symbolic of a distance between the Church and society which was revealed even more clearly in the desperation of religious revivalism and the frenetic promises and threats of the gospel hymns.

Gospel Hymns There were attempts at revival and evangelism throughout the nineteenth century, with important episodes in America in 1858 and in Northern Ireland in 1859; from the point of view of hymn-writing, however, the most important event was the controversial and celebrated visit of Dwight L. Moody and Ira D. Sankey to Britain in 1873–5. This led to the publication of Sacred Songs and Solos, a book which rapidly became popular and which was added to in subsequent editions to make a substantial hymn-book. It should not be forgotten, of course, that its pages contained the writings of many hymn-writers, including evangelical ones such as Wesley and Cowper. There was some rewriting of evangelical texts, as in Rian A. Dykes's version of Cowper: Behold a fountain deep and wide, Behold its onward flow; 'Twas opened in the Saviour's side, And cleanseth white as snow.

617

William White, Memoir of Thomas T. Lynch (London, 1874), 109–10.

618

Albert Peel, These Hundred Years: A History of the Congregational Union of England and Wales, 1831–1931 (London, 1931), 220.


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But there were also hymns by writers such as Watts, Doddridge, Neale, Lyte, Addison, and Caswall; in spite of this, the general character of the book was very different from that of mainstream hymn-books. It was to some extent signalled by the catchy alliterative title: it contained many hymns by American evangelicals such as P. P. Bliss, described by Lionel Adey as ‘the most balefully productive of all gospel hymnists save the indefatigable Fanny Crosby’.619 It was clearly intended to allow its readers and singers to have a set of texts which recaptured something of the atmosphere of Moody's revival meetings, giving biblical sources, and occasionally small anecdotes which explained the provenance. The Moody and Sankey campaign divided people into enthusiasts and detractors. In the words of one contemporary ‘with one class they are simply Yankee adventurers of the Barnum type’ while by others ‘the entire movement is believed to be the result of direct impression from heaven, and Moody and Sankey persons but little if any inferior in their divine gifts to the Apostle Paul’.620 A popular volume, on sale at railway bookstalls, gave an account of ‘their lives and labours’, arguing that Moody was ‘simple, direct, kindly, and hopeful’, while Sankey had ‘a tenor voice of remarkable power and beauty’.621 A different-minded visitor to the meetings, Charles Voysey, described them as ‘a fresh proof of the marvellous power, not of the Gospel, but of advertising’, but even he was impressed by Sankey: As for the singer, he sang well and his tunes were sweet and full of pathos, and there was a kind of rough simplicity in his expression that was very agreeable, in spite of an accent which reminded one, now and then, of what is known as street-singing.622 Although they became celebrities, the signs are that Moody and Sankey's appeal was not to the working class (as had been hoped by those who had invited them, such as Cuthbert Bainbridge, the Newcastle businessman) but to those who were already struggling towards respectability, young men whose affiliation to organizations such as the YMCA (with which Moody had worked in Chicago) was helping them towards stability—both financial and emotional. The result was that they were, on the whole, preaching to the converted, offering what John Kent has described neatly as ‘consolation, as much as conversion’.623 In addition to consolation, however, there was a good deal of manipulation. Although Moody, in the words of H. L. Mencken, ‘put the soft pedal

619

Lionel Adey, Class and Idol in the English Hymn (Vancouver, 1988), 63.

620

George Sexton, An Impartial Review of the Revival Movement of Messrs Moody and Sankey (London, 1875), 4, 5.

621

Moody and Sankey, the New Evangelists, their Lives and Labours; together with a history of the present great religious movement (London, 1875), 17, 10.

622

Charles Voysey, On Messrs. Moody and Sankey: The Fallacy of their Gospel Exposed (three sermons, London, 1875), 4.

623

John Kent, Holding the Fort: Studies in Victorian Revivalism (London, 1978), 225.

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on hell’ in his sermons,624 it was still there as an ever-present threat. And if congregations were manipulated, literary texts were appropriated. Sankey wanted to set as a solo the lyric from Tennyson's ‘Guinevere’, with its reference to the parable of the wise and the foolish virgins: Late, late, so late! but we can enter still. Too late! too late! ye cannot enter now. Similarly, an outrageous rewriting of Lydia Huntley Sigourney's ‘Jesus of Nazareth passeth by’ ended with a sinister promise to those who refused the call: ‘Too late! too late!’ will be the cry— ‘Jesus of Nazareth has passed by.’ Another lamented ‘Nothing but leaves!’ (from Mark 11: 13); and in another those who ignored warnings were likened to those who took no notice of Noah: The storm-cloud of Justice rolls dark overhead; And when by its fury you're tossed, Alas, of your perishing souls 'twill be said, ‘They heard—they refused—and were lost!’ The italicizing of these last phrases is typically insensitive: these hymns cannot leave the message, crude though it is, to do its own work. Instead, the text has to give a final force to the last blow, a final severe cut with the spiritual cane: its air of satisfaction is part of a sadistic urge to see those who do not share the views of the revivalists getting their comeuppance. At the same time, this brutality coexists with a pathetic false modesty, usually rendered by the words ‘only’ or ‘even’: ‘Only an armour bearer’, ‘Even me’. The self-regard of these phrases is found again and again in the use of the word ‘me’: ‘glory for me’; ‘do not pass me by’; ‘Jesus loves me’; or ‘There is a gate that stands ajar’: Oh, depth of mercy; can it be That gate was left ajar for me, For me! . . . for me! Was left ajar for me! The echo of Charles Wesley (‘And can it be. . . ’) is plain, and the ‘for me’ is found in Wesley too; but here the pauses and repetitions allow the word ‘me’ to resonate with self-satisfaction, rather than with Wesley's wonder: I am so glad that Jesus loves me, Jesus loves me, Jesus loves even me.

624

H. L. Mencken, ‘The Scourge of Satan’, quoted by Kent, Holding the Fort, 170.


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The appeal is to a simplicity that is in danger of becoming complacent, with no room for doubt or thought. In the verse preceding the refrain of ‘Jesus loves even me’, the word ‘just’ is a revealing dismissal of more complex possibilities: Satan, dismayed, from my soul now doth flee, When I just tell him that Jesus loves me. The simplicity of the gospel is insisted on again and again (in capital letters): Tell me the Old, Old Story Of unseen things above, Of Jesus and his glory, Of Jesus and his love. Tell me the story simply, As to a little child, From Katherine Hankey's regressive and infantile posturing, the next stage is the childish claiming of Jesus as a friend—‘I've found a Friend; oh, such a Friend!’. When the adult voice appears, it switches from this thumb-sucking egotism to a highly developed super-ego, either punishing or exhorting: ‘Have courage, my boy, to say “No” ’; ‘Dare to be a Daniel’; ‘Stand up! stand up for Jesus!’. The most extraordinary and the most banal examples of this genre were the widely sung temperance hymns, found in such books as Hoyle's Hymns and Songs for Temperance Societies and Bands of Hope and The Primitive Methodist Temperance Melodist, which cajole, threaten, and bully in the name of water: Let us rally for the right, boys, rally once again, Shouting the call for Prohibition! Let us gather from the mountain, gather from the plain, Shouting the call for Prohibition! No license for ever—hurrah, boys, hurrah! Away with the liquor! close up the bar! While we rally for the right, boys, rally once again, Shouting the call for Prohibition! Threatening, sadistic, bullying, regressive, self-centred, these hymns of the revival movements have for the most part, though not entirely, fallen out of use. Modern readers, alerted by critics such as E. P. Thompson to the pervasive sadomasochism and a ‘perplexing and unpleasant’ sexuality in hymns (as far back as the eighteenth century), are no longer prepared to subscribe to patterns of emotional behaviour which they can now recognize as false and psychologically destructive.625 Many of them appear ridiculous to a more sophisticated age, and are sung with ironic enthusiasm as a joke.

625

E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1963), 370–1.

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Yet the popularity of Sankey's book suggests that it filled a need for many singers in the late nineteenth century; and there are some hymns in the book which avoid the worst excesses, and some which have found their way into mainstream hymn-books. The refined English Hymnal printed five of them, including the dramatic ‘Hold the Fort’, based on the battle for Kenesaw mountain during the American Civil War, and transposed into the metaphorical mode by P. P. Bliss: Ho, my comrades! see the signal Waving in the sky! Reinforcements now appearing, Victory is nigh! ‘Hold the Fort, for I am coming,’ Jesus signals still; Wave the answer back to Heaven, ‘By Thy grace we will.’ Such hymns have a rough vigour, which comes from the simple application of an anecdote, faithfully and excitingly reproduced: Pull for the shore, sailor, pull for the shore; Heed not the rolling waves, but bend to the oar; In the preface to this hymn in Sacred Songs and Solos, the sailor replies to the question ‘When once off the old wreck and safe in the life-boat, what remained for you to do?’ to which the answer was ‘Nothing, sir, but just to pull for the shore. ’ The appeal is immediate and direct, the situation life-threatening, the application obvious and forceful. The strong gospel of these hymns was rendered in easily remembered verses, with plenty of repetition and obvious rhyming, set to tunes with lots of dotted crotchets and quavers to give a catchy rhythm to the lines. The repetitions allow the hymns to become almost incantatory: Sowing in the morning, sowing seeds of kindness, Sowing in the noon-tide and the dewy eves: Waiting for the harvest, and the time of reaping, We shall come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves! The singer, as so often in these hymns, then comes to the refrain, which provides a resting-place for the mind, a fixed point to be returned to again and again: Bringing in the sheaves! Bringing in the sheaves! We shall come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves! The language makes its point: say the necessary thing enough times, and repeat the rhythm insistently enough, and it becomes a crude rhetoric of persuasion. The form becomes a part of the experience: the essentials


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are repeated, and then returned to once more (‘Sing it o'er, and o'er again’). The consolation of these hymns is found in the expectation of the next world, and the hymns about heaven form a very distinctive part of Sacred Songs and Solos. They engage the mind with images of happiness that complement those of misery for those who are ‘too late’ or who ignore the gospel call, and they are certainly more attractive than those hymns which threaten. They hold out hopes of a better world; and as the seventeenth-century Puritans were singing on their way to Zion, so here the Victorian middle class struggled to envisage a world ‘over there’: When the mists have rolled in splendour From the beauty of the hills, And the sunlight falls in gladness On the river and the rills, We recall our Father's promise In the rainbow of the spray: We shall know each other better When the mists have rolled away. The language is as predictable as the landscape imagery (‘the beauty of the hills’), the rhymes and rhythms too easy (hills/rills); but heaven is ‘the home over there’, and one day we shall meet our loved ones in it: In the sweet by and by, We shall meet on that beautiful shore. The word ‘beautiful’ appears again here, fatally weakening the line. So does ‘sweet’, which accompanies the phrase ‘by and by’, meaning ‘before long’ but here used unusually as a noun (in another hymn ‘We shall meet beyond the river, | By and by’). The idea of meeting (and of knowing one another better) is common, as in Bliss's ‘Meet Me at the Fountain’, which was based upon the Industrial Exposition at Chicago, where people arranged to meet ‘at the fountain’ in the middle of the exhibition: Will you meet me at the fountain, When I reach the glory-land? Bliss, that indefatigable turner of such episodes into metaphors of the Christian life, was also responsible for one of the few hymns in Sacred Songs and Solos not to run to a jog-trot rhythm. He uses the quotation from Isaiah 53 to give himself a good start: ‘Man of Sorrows’, what a name For the Son of God who came Ruined sinners to reclaim! Hallelujah! what a Saviour!

496


The first three lines of each verse are a dignified and appropriate description of the Atonement; only with the fourth line does the verse become an exclamation. The problems of Sacred Songs and Solos are manifold: the manipulative element of the hymns, which were of a piece with Moody's sermons (John Kent has identified ‘a consummate cruelty’ in his preaching626); the obvious sentimental and escapist ideas of heaven; and, above all, the particular rhetoric which the writers of that time devised to appeal to large audiences. The words, rhythms, stanza-forms, and the tunes that went with them, all allow a quick and emotional response; and it is not surprising that some have remained popular. Fanny Crosby's ‘To God be the glory!’ is still widely sung: To God be the glory! great things he hath done: So loved He the world that He gave us his Son; Who yielded His life an atonement for sin, And opened the Life gate that all may go in. O perfect redemption, the purchase of blood, To ev'ry believer the promise of God; The vilest offender who truly believes, That moment from Jesus a pardon receives. The sentiments have the authority of scripture, but stated as baldly as this they become crude, an announcement of a kind of instant salvation (reinforced by the inevitable refrain, ‘Praise the Lord; Praise the Lord’); or a call to evangelize— Rescue the perishing, care for the dying; Jesus is merciful, Jesus will save. More than most of the contributors to Sacred Songs and Solos, Fanny Crosby writes of the love of God rather than of the fear of punishment; but her hymns of love contain phrases which would have disturbed John Wesley, with his dislike of endearments in religious language: O my Saviour, love me, Make me all Thine own; Draw me nearer, nearer, blessed Lord, To the Cross where Thou hast died: Draw me nearer, nearer, nearer, blessed Lord, To Thy precious, bleeding side. Fanny Crosby was an obsessive hymn-writer, more prolific even than Charles Wesley, and writing under a variety of pseudonyms. Like Wesley, she returned again and again to the uncompleted expression of her faith,

626

Kent, Holding the Fort, 201.


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and she used words and phrases which echo his (submission, happy, lost). The difference is in the way in which Wesley can make his verse reflect not only human experience but also a profound examination of relevant passages from the New Testament, while Crosby, using the same ideas, relies on superficial emotional states: Perfect submission, all is at rest, I in my Saviour am happy and blest; Watching and waiting, looking above, Filled with His goodness, lost in His love. This hymn, with its basic rhythmical pattern of three short syllables followed by a long one, has ideas that are very similar to (say) ‘Love divine, all loves excelling’, but they are mediated through these galloping lines and unnecessary doubles (‘happy and blest’, ‘Watching and waiting’). It is a striking (and still popular) example of the way in which the style of Sacred Songs and Solos affects the content, so that even when writing of love and salvation, and not of threats and backsliding, the hymns reduce the complexities of human experience to an excitable repetition, an assertive sentimentality. That sentimentality is the product of the expression, and the tricks of expression come from another (much finer) folk hymnody, to which we must now turn.

Afro-American Slave Songs The greatest problem with Sacred Songs and Solos is that they do not address the fundamental problem of human selflove, which—as Freud so clearly suggested—was under threat from the science of the age. What Freud called ‘the universal narcissism of men’ received, as he saw it, ‘three wounds’: from Copernican theory, in which the world is no longer the centre of the universe; from Darwinian theory, in which human beings are no longer superior to animals; and finally from psychoanalytic theory.627 This third is not our concern at this point, but the problems of gospel hymnody are highlighted by the other two: Sacred Songs and Solos continued to minister to human narcissism, at a time when it should not have been doing so. The conditions of production allow negro slave songs to escape from this charge. Their language was a response to conditions of slavery and indignity, of a kind that made their songs a highly charged response to captivity, both physical and spiritual. As Frederick Douglass, the slave who escaped to write the narrative of his life, wrote: ‘The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is

627

Sigmund Freud, Complete Psychological Works, ed. James Strachey (London, 1953–6), 17, 140–1; I am indebted for the quotation to Gilian Beer, Darwin's Plots (London, 1983).

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relieved by its tears.’628 The phrase ‘by and by’, for example (which was taken over and spoilt by the writer of ‘In the sweet by and by’), has a promise of joy and rest before long: By and by, I'm goin' to lay down this heavy load. By and by, by and by. The patterns of repetition here have a colloquial ring, as they are spaced in the verse; and those patterns of repetition which are so common and so forceful in Sacred Songs and Solos are a debased version from the same source: I've got a robe, you've got a robe, All God's children got a robe, When I get to heaven goin' to put on my robe, Goin' to shout all over God's heaven. The preoccupation with heaven as the beautiful land across the river is another of the characteristics of Afro-American hymnody which the evangelical hymn-writers took over. In the slave songs, however, it has a power and an authenticity which comes from envisioning heaven as a release from the servitude and drudgery of life. It also helped to restore to the slave a sense of dignity. The negro in America, in Daniel F. Boorstin's words, ‘felt with special poignancy the unease and loneliness and inadequacy, from which he could hope to find relief only by looking upward’.629 Until the defeat of the South in the Civil War and the emancipation of the slaves, routes of escape were blocked, especially after the Fugitive Slave Act (which Whittier so deplored), and only a few fortunate ones succeeded in getting as far as Canada, where they were safe. The other escape route was to go to heaven, and so, as E. Franklin Frazier has written, ‘the Negro was constantly concerned with death’.630 The image is that of heaven as home: Swing low, sweet chariot, Coming for to carry me home Home lies across the river, the land of Canaan that Moses saw: Roll, Jordan, roll, Roll, Jordan, roll, I want to go to heaven when I die, To hear Jordan roll. Oh brothers you ought t'have been there, Yes, my Lord! A-sitting in the Kingdom, To hear Jordan roll.

628

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845; Penguin edn., New York, 1982), 58.

629

Daniel F. Boorstin, The Americans, ii. The National Experience (New York, 1965), 192.

630

E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Church in America (Liverpool, 1963), 13.


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By a leap of the imagination the singer begins to feel himself already there. Jordan is ‘Deep river’, which the slave wants ‘to cross over into camp ground’. The phrases are simple, straight from the colloquial language of experience, and the more effective for that. They have a natural rhythm, fashioned without artifice: Gwine to meet my massa Jesus, Sooner in the morning. Ride up in the chariot, Sooner in the morning. Ride up in the chariot, Sooner in the morning, And I hope I'll join the band. O Lord, have mercy on me, O Lord, have mercy on me; O Lord, have mercy on me, And I hope I'll join the band. The verse swings between assurance, and hope, and a prayer for mercy, in its expression of a fluctuating relationship between the slave and his master Jesus: the ancient kyrie eleison fits into the unfamiliar context without losing any of its force. The patterns of slave life conditioned religious experience. At a time when the children of slaves could be sold away from their parents, the song went: Sometimes I feel like a motherless child A long ways from home, and God becomes both father and mother to the slave child: I've got a mother in de heaven Outshines de sun, I've got a father in heaven Outshines de sun. Similarly, Saturday nights and Sundays were important, because they were times of rest, times when wonderfully talented musicians would lead their communities in singing and prayer. In some places on Sundays, slaves were encouraged to attend church with their masters, in those places where a ‘theology of slavery’ permitted Christians to hold Africans as slaves, and encouraged slaves to be docile and obedient. This doubtful creed631 was of course undermined consistently by the teachings of Jesus, and by the narrative patterns of the Exodus in the Old Testament. ‘The whites of the

631

It was based on 1 Timothy 6: 1—‘Let as many servants as are under the yoke count their own masters worthy of all honour.’ The Revised Standard Version sharpens the verse by using the word ‘slaves’.

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Old South’, Eugene D. Genovese has written, ‘tried to shape the religious life of their slaves, and the slaves overtly, covertly, and even intuitively fought to shape it themselves.’632 There was therefore something revolutionary and dangerous built into the very act of religious worship: meetings were often held in secret, signalled by the singing of ‘Steal away to Jesus’. And from Black churches, such as the Georgia Baptist church, came songs such as ‘We shall overcome’.633 The slaves came from Africa with highly developed systems of worship, patterns of African traditional religion: their conversion by missionaries or other slaves allowed them to transfer their practices, almost naturally and intuitively, to the new religion, so that there were strong rhythms, dancing, and rapturous singing. Shouting was important also—‘The angels shout in heaven’;634 and to be deeply moved was a sign of authentic religion: ‘ef I sing an’ it doan move me any, den dat a sign on de Holy Ghost; I be tell a lie on de Lord.'635 Freedom was obtainable in two ways. First, by death: No more auction block for me, No more, no more; No more auction block for me, Many thousand gone. It is a tribute to the nobility of these songs that the anger in this song (‘No more hundred lash for me’) is rare. Instead there is a dignified sense of a people in captivity, paralleled by the children of Israel in Egypt. This was the second way of obtaining freedom, through political action and through war: When Israel was in Egypt's land: Let my people go, Oppress'd so hard they could not stand, Let my people go. Go down, Moses, Way down in Egypt land, Tell ole Pharoh, Let my people go. The tenses bring past to present, present to past, in acts of imaginative identification. At the same time, there is a strong awareness of the state of slavery, and of the need to keep going, day by day. It is expressed most remarkably, perhaps, in ‘Inching along’:

632

Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1972, 1974), 162.

633

See Gary Wills, Under God: Religion and American Politics (New York, 1990).

634

Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 238.

635

Ibid. 238.


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Keep a inching along, keep a inching along; Jesus will come by'nd bye; Keep a inching along like a poor inch worm, Jesus will come by'nd bye. We'll inch and inch and inch along, Jesus will come by'nd bye; And inch and inch till we get home, Jesus will come by'nd bye. This marvellous song rings a new and vivid change on the old image of the worm, if only because it captures vividly the daily endurance, the slow progress towards Jesus: the looper caterpillar becomes the absolute constitutive symbol, the image that expresses perfectly the condition it is indicating. The song, therefore, is the opposite of the instant salvation preached by Fanny Crosby. Its musical setting is equally remarkable, with a range of only three notes. Such spiritual songs were given widespread currency after the Civil War by groups such as the Jubilee Singers, which gave concerts to raise money for negro education, especially for Fisk University, founded at Nashville, Tennessee, in the aftermath of the war. Beginning in 1871, these singers travelled America and then Europe, and finally Australia and Japan, enchanting audiences with their rendering of spirituals. At the same time, the texts first became widely available, with the publication of Slave Songs of the United States in 1867.636 The importance of these songs to nineteenth-century hymn-writing is in their discovery of a new kind of rhetoric, incantatory and repetitive, which was used by the evangelicals to give a new impetus to their hymn-writing. Sacred Songs and Solos often contains the same kind of sentiments as earlier evangelical hymnody, but it employs techniques which derive from a slave tradition: and for that reason, it is bound to seem inauthentic and second-hand when set beside it. Lionel Adey has described the rhythms and cadences of ‘Deep River’, and commented that ‘not one of the seven hundred and fifty is fit to stand beside it’.637 Gospel hymnody was an artificial construction, a deliberate using of these techniques to manipulate the hearts and minds of the singers and listeners; and some slave songs are still used in hymn-books. It is difficult to know whether this is justifiable: whether or not those who have never suffered slavery and persecution have any right to sing ‘Kum ba ya, my Lord’: Someone's crying, Lord, Kum ba ya But whether justified or not, it is clear that the patterns of rhetoric established at this time have had an effect on Church worship, and especially on

636

Edited by William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison.

637

Adey, Class and Idol in the English Hymn, 61.

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the development of so-called ‘charismatic’ hymns, with their use of repetitions and refrains. If the gospel hymns of Sacred Songs and Solos are disappearing, the rhetoric which they used is not.

Scottish Hymns During the nineteenth century, Scottish hymnody had a character of its own, and made an important contribution to the pattern of available hymns (Welsh hymnody lies outside the scope of this book638). Scottish worship was dominated for three centuries by the singing of metrical psalms, beginning with the Scottish Psalter of 1564–5 and continuing with subsequent revisions, notably The Psalms of David in Meeter of 1650. During the eighteenth century attempts were made to include paraphrases of other passages of Holy Scripture: experiments were begun in 1745 (not a very propitious year for liturgical experiment in Scotland, with a Jacobite Rebellion in full career), culminating in the publication in 1781 of Translations and Paraphrases, in Verse, of several Passages of Sacred Scripture. This edition contained some fine paraphrases in Common Metre, notably ‘Behold th'amazing gift of love’ (from 1 John 3: 1–3 and Galatians 4: 6), ‘Behold the Mountain of the Lord’ (from Isaiah 2: 2–5 or Micah 4: 1–5), and ‘Come let us to the Lord our God’ (from Hosea 6: 1–4). The writers of these paraphrases, William Cameron, Michael Bruce, and John Morison, were attempting to extend the range of material available for worship, and also to mitigate the effects of the convoluted rhetoric, with its multiple inversions, of Reformation psalmody. The paraphrases were a beginning, but hymn-writing was slow to develop in Scotland. This was probably owing to the intense feeling for the metrical psalter among ordinary people (as described by Burns in ‘The Cottar's Saturday Night’): it had, after all, been the book of the persecuted church. There was also a deep respect for the words of Holy Scripture (‘Let us hear the Word of God. . . ’) which allowed the development of paraphrases but discouraged the evolution of hymns. It was no coincidence that the finest Scottish hymn-writer of the Romantic period, Sir Robert Grant, was educated at Cambridge, became an English Member of Parliament, and died in India as Governor of Bombay. The most important Scottish hymn-writer of the nineteenth century was Horatius Bonar, who left the Church of Scotland and joined the Free Church at the ‘Disruption’ of 1843. His hymns were first published at that time in Songs for the Wilderness (two volumes, 1843, 1844), where the title perhaps indicates the confused and painful period of schism. Bonar's chief work, however, was found in the more optimistically titled three

638

For Welsh hymns, see Alan Luff's excellent study, Welsh Hymns and their Tunes (Carol Stream, Ill., and London, 1990).


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volumes of Hymns of Faith and Hope (1857, 1861, 1866). The conjunction of faith and hope is typical of Bonar: he works with doubles, often reversing them in successive lines, as in ‘Divine Order’: 'Tis first the true and then the beautiful, Not first the beautiful and then the true; The same pattern occurs in his well-known hymn for Holy Communion: Jesus, song and strength art thou Strength and song for ever! Strength that never can decay, Song that ceaseth never. Still to us this strength and song Through eternal days prolong. Bonar's phrases fit neatly—almost too neatly—into the verse-form: he is the most craftsmanlike of hymn-writers. His poems suggest strong affections for places, for nature (especially the sea), together with a strong dislike of the artificial. His poem on the Great Exhibition of 1851, ‘The Seen and the Unseen’, is a sustained contrast between ‘Earth's uncovered waste of riches’ and the spiritual world. The Crystal Palace shines with wonders, but the poet longs for the City of God: Yes, I need thee, heavenly city, My low spirit to upbear; Yes, I need thee; earth's enchantments So beguile me with their glare. Let me see thee, then these fetters Break asunder; I am free: Then this pomp no longer chains me; Faith has won the victory. Heir of glory, That shall be for thee and me! Bonar is unusual in confronting the materialism of the world so directly. He does so in order to emphasize the higher life, ‘Things hoped for’ (the title of one of his hymns). Sometimes, as in that hymn, the hope emerges in tired imagery (‘These are the crowns we shall wear’) but the hope of heaven is balanced by a healthy earthiness, of the kind that makes Bonar want to write about the Great Exhibition and place it in his scheme of things. That scheme is one in which the pilgrim church pursues its way, beset by the same problems that it has always known, a story that is ‘Old, and yet ever new’: 'Tis the same story still, The briar and the thorn; Of grace and love still flowing down To pardon and to bless.

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'Tis the old sorrow still, The briar and the thorn; And 'tis the same old solace yet, The hope of coming morn. ‘The same old solace’: in such a phrase we recognize a note that is individual, a recognition in Bonar's work of the hard work of life (‘Go, labour on; spend and be spent’) but also of the necessity of faith and hope, and above all, of love: O wide-embracing, wondrous love! We read thee in the sky above, We read thee in the earth below, In seas that swell and streams that flow. More important than finding God in nature (as this hymn, ‘O love of God, how strong and true’, goes on to suggest) is finding Him in the figure of Jesus. Bonar turns the Holy Communion into a face-to-face encounter (‘Here, O my Lord, I see Thee face to face’): This is the hour of banquet and of song, This is the heavenly table spread for me; Here let me feast, and, feasting, still prolong The brief, bright hour of fellowship with Thee. The reconstruction of the meal is Herbert-like, though the expansive lines are more self-indulgent and leisurely; and Bonar, with his matter-of-factness, writes one of the few Communion hymns to record the end of the service: Too soon we rise: the symbols disappear; The feast, though not the love, is past and gone; The bread and wine remove, but Thou art here, Nearer than ever, still my Shield and Sun. Bonar says the same thing twice over, partly for emphasis, but partly also because his particular ‘auld dominie’ style demands it. He returns again and again (as in the last line of this verse) to the double attributes (‘Jesus, Sun and Shield art Thou’): I looked to Jesus, and I found In Him my Star, my Sun; The lines come from ‘The Voice of Jesus’, a hymn which presents Bonar's strengths and weaknesses in a particularly clear form: I heard the voice of Jesus say ‘Come unto me and rest; Lay down, thou weary one, lay down Thy head upon my breast’;


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This dreary opening shows how Bonar's ponderous style weighs down the sentiment: the chief merit of the stanza is the clear division into two halves, so that the second half lightens the load: I came to Jesus as I was, Weary, and worn, and sad; I found in him a resting-place, And he has made me glad. The division into two halves is typical Bonar, straightforward and solid, effective because of its obviousness: it was brilliantly caught by J. B. Dykes in his tune VOX DILECTI, which changes key from G minor to G major (Vaughan Williams and Percy Dearmer threw it out in favour of the English folk tune KINGSFOLD). What the hymn also does is to give the sayings of Jesus an unmistakable intimacy, which continues throughout. It moves the hymn towards the mystical tradition, only to reverse that movement by the weak ending of the last verse: I looked to Jesus, and I found In him my star, my sun; And in that light of life I'll walk Till travelling days are done. The image of travelling is introduced too abruptly to be effective: the singer, who has been weary and thirsty, suddenly picks up his pilgrim staff and becomes a traveller on life's way. The same processes of weariness are found everywhere in Victorian hymnody (‘Art thou weary, art thou languid’), but nowhere more dramatically than in George Matheson's tense and dramatic ‘O Love that wilt not let me go’. The image of not letting go is from Jacob's wrestling with the angel, and Matheson's hymn is full of the paradoxes that are associated with that story. As the author of ‘Make me a captive, Lord | And then I shall be free’, Matheson seems to have been fascinated by paradoxes (much more so than plodding Bonar), but he never wrote a hymn with such swirling imagery. It is the verbal equivalent of a psychedelic experience: O Love that wilt not let me go, I rest my weary soul in Thee: I give Thee back the life I owe, That in Thine ocean depths its flow May richer, fuller be. The process of giving back to God the life which He gave, so that it may become fuller and richer, is made more intense by the image of the ocean depths, which suggests self-drowning; similarly, the other verses have images that tend to reinforce the ‘wrestling Jacob’ idea of being over-whelmed in order to triumph. In verse 2 the flickering torch of the individual

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life is consumed by the sunshine in order that it may (paradoxically) burn brighter; in verse 3 the rain (associated with pain and suffering) is necessary for the rainbow to appear; and in verse 4 the cross leads to self-surrender. The final image is of new life springing from the dust, life's glory giving way to another kind of life as the death of the old self leads to the birth of the new. The image of ‘from the ground there blossoms red’ suggests blood, flowers, life, all coming out of the life which is given up, even as a grain of wheat falls into the ground in order to produce new growth. Matheson's hymn sweeps up these images in its rapid assimilation of ideas, its succession of powerful images to speak to the same condition: as a hymn of self-surrender it is dramatic in the extreme, holding out the hope of eventual good on the other side of the struggle. It conflates the images of individual struggle from the Jacob legend (‘I dare not ask to fly from thee’) with the image of the cross itself, the central moment of suffering: and in those conflations the Old and New Testament images jostle one another like the shapes in an impressionist painting. Matheson combines a writing of deliberate allusion with imagery that is often imprecise, to form a text that is both opaque and resonant.

Children's Hymns Two things came together to make the writing of children's hymns a popular occupation in the nineteenth century. The first was the new rhetoric of repetition, with refrains; the second was the worry about the decline in Church attendance and the need to write hymns for the next generation. The idea was not, of course, new: there had been rhymes for children in Bunyan's day, and Ken had written for the scholars of Winchester College; Isaac Watts's Divine and Moral Songs had been very popular throughout the eighteenth century, and Charles Wesley provided a section of children's hymns in Hymns and Sacred Poems (1742). Later he produced Hymns for Children (1763), including ‘Gentle Jesus, meek and mild’ and ‘Good Thou art, and good Thou dost’ (in ‘Hymns for the Youngest’). The first of these, with its simple lines and its absence of sentiment, is a model of what a children's hymn should be; the second is rather mature ‘for the youngest’, but reflects the Wesley's belief that one should not talk down to children.639 Many of the nineteenth-century children's hymns, unhappily, made that mistake. Ann and Jane Taylor's Hymns for Infant Minds, for example, contains (in the 1812 edition)— Jesus, who lived above the sky, Came down to be a man and die;

639

See John Wesley's preface to Hymns for Children, And Other of Riper Years, dated 1790: ‘There are two ways of writing or speaking to children: the one is, to let ourselves down to them; the other, to lift them up to us.’


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And in the Bible we may see How very good he used to be. The concepts are broad and simple, but the language falls either into cliché (‘above the sky’) or banality (‘How very good’), presumably designed for the very young: we may recall the infant Ruskin's preaching—‘People, be good’. It must have been for the children of such evangelical parents as the Ruskins that the last verse was intended: He knew how wicked man had been, He knew that God must punish sin; So, out of pity, Jesus said He'd bear the punishment instead. This is an attempt to put atonement theology into the language of the nursery, with the colloquial ‘He'd’ (for ‘he would’) as a condescending piece of grammar. Horatius Bonar does better: Early seeking, early finding; —Happy, happy we! Looking up in life's sweet morning, Looking up to Thee; We begin our childhood's days, Lord of glory, with Thy praise. The idealized view of childhood found here in the feeble ‘life's sweet morning’ is only one of the problems facing those who would write for children in the nineteenth century. There is an uneasy condescension in many of the hymns, a simplifying of the gospel so that it sounds trite, and at the same time a cloying sentimentality; while in Mrs Alexander's hymns for children, as we have seen, there is a further voice, that of duty and discipline. Apparently oblivious of the problem, hymn-writers turned out children's hymns in vast numbers, and reprinted them with enthusiasm in collection after collection. A hymn that was thought to strike the right note, such as Albert Midlane's ‘There's a friend for little children’ appeared again and again: equipped with a tune by Stainer, it was a piece of crude and cheap versification: There's a home for little children Above the bright blue sky; Where Jesus reigns in glory— A home of peace and joy. No home on earth is like it, Nor can with it compare, For every one is happy, Nor can be happier, there.

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This is a sad reflection on the failure to find an adequate voice to address children, and it also conceals a sinister subtext (which is found in Andrew Sherwood's ‘Where will you spend eternity?’). John Ellerton was one of the few people aware of the problem. He wrote to Mrs Carey Brock, who had asked him for help in editing the Church of England Children's Hymn Book (1881), that ‘I am quite of your mind that we do not want it to be a book of baby hymns, still less of hymns written down for “infant minds” by people who are well-meaning, but do not understand children.’640 However, the well-meaning continued, in great numbers: the best study of their productions is Lionel Adey's Class and Idol in the English Hymn, which deals sharply and humanely with hymns for children of this period, including some of the most appalling examples of hymn-writing imaginable. Adey's verdict is succinct and highly appropriate: ‘In youth, a thick skin can be a blessing.’641 He also deals with the rise of the Public School hymn-books, beginning with Rugby in 1824, and gradually coming to inculcate a cult of ‘high manliness’, which eventually shaped the idealism of the officer and gentleman class in the Great War. ‘Broad church idealism’, writes Adey, ‘proved all too compatible with militaristic patriotism.’642 Children's hymns are difficult to discuss as literary texts because they are so endlessly revelatory of the character and assumptions of their writers, and in Adey's splendid study they have been appropriately considered. To anyone attempting to recover the hymn as a subject for serious critical study they are an embarrassment. The examples quoted above are in many ways the least offensive, even though they are filled with catch-phrases such as ‘Above the clear blue sky’. Others are difficult to read without anger, if only because we have the example of Blake's innocence to set against them. To find a children's hymn that (in the words of the ‘Introduction’ to Songs of Innocence) ‘every child may joy to hear’ we would have to go back to Charles Wesley: Gentle Jesus, meek and mild, Look upon a little child; Pity my simplicity, Suffer me to come to Thee. Fain I would to Thee be brought; Dearest Lord, forbid it not; Give a little child a place In the kingdom of Thy grace. The lines are clear and delicately simple, each one able to be taken in on its own and yet each one forming a part of the whole; ‘Gentle Jesus’ is clearly an oversimplification (it produced Blake's indignant ‘Was Jesus gentle?’) but it is one that can be accepted because it was clearly one of the attributes

640

Henry Housman, John Ellerton . . . on Hymnody (London, 1896), 88.

641

Adey, Class and Idol in the English Hymn, 163.

642

Ibid. 188.


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of his character, and an attribute that a child might wish to respond to. He is to ‘Look upon a little child’, no more, the very plainness of the line made explicit in the next line by ‘Pity my simplicity’, where the four-syllabled word varies the otherwise spare diction. That plain speech recurs in the last line, with the trochaic ‘Suffer’ followed by the absolutely regular ‘to come to Thee’. The language is dignified without being difficult, and plain without being condescending: and in the second verse the prayer is not for a home above the bright blue sky, but a prayer for grace. It succeeds in a becoming modesty as much as it succeeds in simplicity of language. In the nineteenth century, different denominations and movements became zealous for their own children. The Congregationalists and Methodists each produced their own book for children, and the Children's Special Service Mission produced Golden Bells (including ‘a large selection very kindly granted from Sacred Songs and Solos’), while movements such as the Christian Endeavour Union produced their own hymn-book in 1896. It includes hymns of exhortation for ‘Endeavourers on Active Service’, presuming an ability to pick up biblical references that would now be impossible—‘I my Ebenezer raise | To my kind Redeemer's praise.’ Carey Bonner, an indefatigable editor of children's hymns, produced in 1905 The Sunday School Hymnary, subtitled ‘A Twentieth-Century Hymnal for Young People’, beginning with ‘Our Father in Heaven’ and ‘Jesus and the Little Ones’, and graduating upwards to ‘Christian Character and Conduct’, ‘National Hymns’, and ‘The Joy of Service’. Many of the hymns in the later sections are those which would have found a place in any hymn-book; but the editing of such a book as this is evidence of the seriousness with which the cause of children's Christian education was taken. In Child Songs (1914), Bonner tried to go outside the Church by compiling a book ‘for the Primary and Junior Departments of the Sunday School and Day School and for Home Singing’. In a laudatory foreword, George Hamilton Archibald quoted with approval the idea that ‘the first five subjects that need emphasis in Sunday School worship are Gratitude, Goodwill, Faith, Loyalty, and Reverence.’ The book itself was an extremely odd mixture, an extreme example of the uncertainty that affects all these books. It included Caswall's ‘When morning gilds the skies’ but also Florence Hoatson's Take a yellow sunbeam, And some bluey skies,— You have Baby's tiny curls, And his pretty eyes. This is an extreme example of the confusion of aim and the failure of understanding that affected nineteenth-century hymn-books for children. They treated children with a disconcerting mixture of seriousness

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(admonishing and correcting) and uneasy sentimentality (expecting them to respond to ideas of themselves as ‘little’ and ‘tiny’, and to nature as full of sweet little creatures). Their failure must have been one of the contributory causes which led to an exasperation with the current state of hymnody, which in turn led to The Yattendon Hymnal and the English Hymnal.

19 Into the Twentieth Century Is it true that during the last eighty years the Churches have been gently singing themselves downhill? (Percy Dearmer, 1933) Not long after the edition of 1889, Hymns Ancient and Modern came close to being adopted as an official hymn-book of the Church of England. At the time it was clearly the dominant hymn-book: according to one set of figures, collected in 1891, 10,340 churches used Hymns Ancient and Modern; 1,462 used Church Hymns; 1,478 used the Hymnal Companion to the Book of Common Prayer; and 379 used other books.643 The scheme to adopt Hymns Ancient and Modern as the official book for Convocation, and the misunderstandings which led to its abandonment, have been described by W. K. Lowther Clarke, and there is no need to repeat his narrative here.644 The proposal was noteworthy, however, because it marked the high tide in the fortunes of Hymns Ancient and Modern: although it continued (and still continues) to be an important hymn-book, it never recovered the pre-eminence which it had in the 1890s. To some extent this was the result of the decline of the Church in the twentieth century. With hindsight, the seeds of that decline may already be observed during the 1870s in the Church-centred hymns of Bishops How and Wordsworth, and (in a different medium altogether) in the frenetic ‘gospel call’ of Sacred Songs and Solos. At the end of the nineteenth century, however, this could hardly have been foreseen; and the challenge to Hymns Ancient and Modern came from within the Church itself. It was connected with the aesthetic movements of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and in particular with the influence of Ruskin and Pater;645 it emerged most clearly in the work of Robert Bridges.

643

From a report to the Convocation of Canterbury, 1894: Percy Dearmer, ‘Preface’, Songs of Praise Discussed, (London, 1933), p. xxiv.

644

W. K. Lowther Clarke, A Hundred Years of Hymns Ancient and Modern (London, 1960), 60 ff.

645

Ruskin described Victorian hymnody as ‘half paralytic, half profane’—‘consisting partly of the expression of what the singers never in their lives felt, or attempted to feel; and partly in the address of prayers to God, which nothing could more disagreeably astonish them than His attending to.’ The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London, 1903–12), xxxi. 116.

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INTO THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

The Yattendon Hymnal Robert Bridges, who was the choirmaster in the village of Yattendon, near Oxford, was concerned with the words but also with the music.646 He deplored the mid-Victorian tunes of Monk and Dykes, and persuaded his choir to sing plainsong, Reformation tunes, Gibbons, Tallis, and Bach. He saw himself as restoring dignity to parish worship: The Yattendon Hymnal, which he edited with his friend H. E. Wooldridge, made a strong statement in a number of ways—by its choice of words and music, but also by the layout and printing. It was printed between 1895 and 1899 by Horace Hart, Printer to the University of Oxford, in close collaboration with Bridges: Hart was an expert on type-faces, and used the finest ‘Fell’ type-face, on good paper, folio size, with Fell wood-blocks and other ornaments, and red ink for the leger lines of the plainsong staves. The music was in the music type of Peter Walpergen, the index of music in Fell double Pica italic, the text of the hymns in small Pica roman. The result was a book that was an aesthetic experience to look at and handle, a book which was clearly making a statement over against the simple and serviceable presentation of Hymns Ancient and Modern.647 The words of the hymns were printed between the staves, and each voice had its own stave (as in the old Scottish psalm books, or a choral work): this was a singer's book, and the choice was to be limited, so that the singer's repertoire was not to be too extensive. There were one hundred hymns only, and apart from seven tunes by Wooldridge, the music was mainly from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The words were also selected, but not so strictly: Bridges used some of the texts from ‘H. Anc. & Mod.’ (as he wrote it), including many ‘from the Latin’, but also some by Isaac Watts (‘Come let us join our cheerful songs’ set to the rather uncheerful DUNDEE), Thomas Kelly (‘The Head that once was crown'd with thorns’), and Charles Wesley (‘Hark! how all the welkin rings’, with a tune by Wooldridge to replace MENDELSSOHN, which had been in use since 1861). Other wellknown hymns included ‘Abide with me’ (Lyte), ‘Hark! the glad sound’ (Doddridge), ‘King of glory, king of peace’ (Herbert), and Thomas Ken's morning and evening hymns. The most interesting additions were made by Bridges himself. Many were translations from the Latin, such as ‘Love of the Father, love of God the Son’, set to Orlando Gibbons's SONG 22, in which Bridges's stately

646

See Alan Dunstan, ‘Robert Bridges's Contribution to English Hymnody’, Bulletin of the Hymn Society, 151 (April 1981), 205–12; and Nicholas Temperley, The Music of the English Parish Church (Cambridge, 1979), i. 3212.

647

For an account of the printing of The Yattendon Hymnal, see Stanley Morison, John Fell, the University Press and the ‘Fell’ Types (Oxford, 1967), 205 ff.


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pentameters ride majestically on the tune, line by line, serenely disregarding the normal word-order and producing an effect which is curiously like Reformation psalmody: Thou the All-holy, Thou supreme in Might, Thou dost give Peace, thy Presence maketh Right: Thou with thy Favour all things dost enfold, With thine All-kindness free from harm wilt hold. Bridges was an expert on English prosody, and had written two distinguished essays on Milton's poetry: his lines show a distinctly Miltonic ability to use pauses and caesuras (although Milton preferred blank verse, and Bridges's rhymes give strength to his hymnody).648 The use of repetition (‘Thou . . . Thou’) is found frequently, even in shorter verseforms, such as his translation of Charles Coffin's ‘O quam juvat’: Happy are they, they that love God, Whose hearts have Christ confest, where the ‘they, they’, together with the caesura, holds up the line in contrast to the free-running second line. Similarly: Glad is the praise, sweet are the songs, Which they together sing; The diction is Miltonic in its dignity and simplicity, and in its artifice: Bridges is prepared to use periphrastic tenses, inversions, and archaic forms, as he does in ‘The duteous day now closeth’, a translation from Paul Gerhardt: The duteous day now closeth, Each flow'r and tree reposeth, Shade creeps o'er wild and wood: Let us, as night is falling, On God our Maker calling, Give thanks to Him the giver good. The inversion at the end is obviously deliberate (it would have been easy enough to avoid) as though Bridges was actually trying to create a formal style, a grand Miltonic discourse that was purposefully not that of ordinary speech. This is very evident in verse 3: His care he drowneth yonder, Lost in th'abyss of wonder; To heaven his soul doth steal: This life he disesteemeth, The day it is that dreameth, That doth from truth his vision seal.

648

The vicar of Yattendon, H. C. Beeching, was also a Milton scholar and a hymn-writer.

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The language is intentionally elaborate, the syntax difficult. The occasion of this care-drowning, in which the night is preferable to the day, is a looking-up at the night sky. Bridges would have known his friend Gerard Manley Hopkins's ‘The Starlight Night’, and probably also Thomas Binney's ‘Eternal Light! Eternal Light!’, but his approach is strikingly different. Where Binney and Hopkins see the stars as holding the purity that is the light of Christ, Bridges (later the author of The Testament of Beauty) sees a loss of self, and a sensuous joy in the loveliness of the night sky: Now all the heavenly splendour Breaks forth in starlight tender From myriad worlds unknown: And man, the marvel seeing, Forgets his selfish being, For joy of beauty not his own. The verse, which has its own suspension and inversion (‘And man, the marvel seeing’), uses the artificiality to emphasize the unusual and very touching simplicity of the final line. It is reminiscent of those passages in Milton in which there is a sudden piercing simplicity; and Bridges links his elaborate rhetoric, as Milton does, with human feeling and an unusual combination of strength and beauty (but not, we observe, with the kind of mystical purity that is found in Binney and Hopkins: in Bridges it is more the delight in the fragile beauty of nature that gives joy, as it does in his ‘London Snow’). It is the beauty of religion that attracts Bridges, rather than its theology or its message of salvation. His choice of hymns from Watts and Wesley rejects those which deal with the Passion or the Crucifixion in favour of those which discourse of heaven (‘Come let us join our cheerful songs’, ‘Let saints on earth in concert sing’); and his best-known translation, from Joachim Neander, is one which emphasizes hope and blessing: All my hope on God is founded: He doth still my strength renew. Me through change and chance he guideth, Only good and only true. God unknown, He alone Calls my heart to be his own. The inversions are extreme, as in line 3, but they interlock with other movements to give a sprung tension to the verse—through line-endings, repetitions, and a final simplicity. The hymn makes no concessions to ordinary speech: it proclaims its grandeur by employing archaic verb forms, unusual syntax, and sweeping metonymies:


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Pride of man and earthly glory, Sword and crown betray his trust: What with care and toil he buildeth, Tower and temple, fall to dust. But God's pow'r, Hour by hour, Is my temple and my tow'r. This is Bridges's Miltonic grandeur at its best: noble and elevated, full of suspensions and phrases in apposition, yet also with a rhythm of its own that allows the singer to feel the contrast between outer power and inner power as majestic. It is what Christopher Ricks, writing of Milton, has called ‘the grand style’ pressed into the service of hymnody, and it makes Bridges one of the most distinctive voices of modern times in hymn-writing—as distinctive as the magnificent appearance of The Yattendon Hymnal. When The Yattendon Hymnal was complete, Bridges wrote an essay entitled ‘A Practical Discourse on Some Principles of Hymn-Singing’, published in a new Journal of Theological Studies. In it he argued (in italics) that ‘the music must be dignified, and suitable to the meaning’. He deplored ‘the setting of hymns to popular airs’, and advocated ‘Dignified Melody’, giving examples from plainsong to the end of the seventeenth century.649 He had a low opinion of modern hymn tunes and of the words that accompanied them: and, like Vaughan Williams a few years later, he regarded the provision of good music and good words as a moral issue: we are content to have our hymn-manuals stuffed with the sort of music which, merging the distinction between sacred and profane, seems designed to make the worldly man feel at home, rather than to reveal to him something of the life beyond his knowledge; compositions full of cheap emotional effects and bad experiments made to be cast aside, the works of the purveyors of marketable fashion, always pleased with themselves, and always to be derided by the succeeding generation.650 Bridges was advised on plainsong by his friend George Herbert Palmer, a pioneer of the revival of plainchant among Anglicans; Percy Dearmer appointed Palmer as choirmaster at St Mary the Virgin, Primrose Hill, in 1901,651 and both took advice from a young musician, Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Hymns Ancient and Modern, 1904, and the English Hymnal Into this turn-of-the-century undercurrent of aesthetic awareness stepped once again Hymns Ancient and Modern, with its well-meaning but disastrous

649

Robert Bridges, ‘A Practical Discourse on Some Principles of Hymn-Singing’, Journal of Theological Studies, 1 (1899–1900), 40–63.

650

Ibid. 63.

651

Temperley, Music of the English Parish Church, i. 322.

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revision of 1904. It appears, with hindsight, that the Proprietors were actually trying to conform to the new mood: as Erik Routley has pointed out,652 the editors (Wooldridge was one of them) were probably motivated by the same considerations that had prompted Bridges to produce his hymn-book, and certainly they followed Bridges in printing original texts, including ‘Hark! how all the welkin rings’. They took enormous trouble over the revision, which was clearly intended to be an inaugural benchmark hymn-book for the new century: the committee met four times a year, usually for the best part of a week, from 1894 onwards. New translations from the Latin were provided, plainsong made more authentic, and the words and tunes carefully overhauled. And yet, in spite of this (or because of it) the book was greeted with a storm of protest: the Proprietors hastily inserted a slip in all copies to say that ‘Hark the herald angels sing’ could be sung if preferred, and that the edition of 1889 would continue to remain on sale.653 Maurice Frost, writing the Historical Companion in the 1960s, was of the opinion that ‘The Proprietors were the victims of their own success’: they had taught the public what hymns and their tunes should be, and Hymns Ancient and Modern was treated as a national possession, on which no one was allowed to lay hands.654 An immediate result was the creation of a serious rival. It had begun when Percy Dearmer and some like-minded colleagues had proposed a supplement to Hymns Ancient and Modern: the setback over the 1904 edition encouraged them to undertake a new book, they said, ‘only after the new edition seemed unlikely to come into very general use’.655 The new book was The English Hymnal, a book which was created on many of the same principles that had animated the revisers of Hymns Ancient and Modern, but unhampered by the success of previous editions.656 The new book was well printed, and looked attractive too, which suggests that the editors had learned something from the presentation of The Yattendon Hymnal. But the chief reason for its success was the idea of excellence which it claimed (and achieved)—‘The English Hymnal is a collection of the best hymns in the English language’ (p. iii)—together with the distinctive tone and feel of the book. Hymns Ancient and Modern had become associated, inevitably, with the Victorian age, and the new book was different. It contained much new

652

Erik Routley, ‘That Dreadful Red Book’, Bulletin of the Hymn Society, 131 (Winter 1974), 80–5.

653

Clarke, A Hundred Years, 76.

654

Maurice Frost, Historical Companion to Hymns Ancient and Modern (London, 1962), 123. Routley, ‘That Dreadful Red Book’, 80–5, agreed: ‘the editors of 1904 were indeed the prisoners of their own tradition’.

655


656

Routley, ‘That Dreadful Red Book’: ‘Really, it seems most unfair, that EH should have got away with everything that these worthy men [the Proprietors of Ancient and Modern ] were after.’


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and fresh music, and here the Proprietors of Hymns Ancient and Modern dug a pit for themselves. Approached by Athelstan Riley (author of ‘Ye watchers and ye holy ones’ and chairman of the committee for The English Hymnal) they refused permission for the reprinting of six hymns and forty-four tunes.657 Vaughan Williams, who was deeply conversant with English folk music, and anti-Victorian as well, seized the opportunity to introduce examples of what are referred to in the index as ‘English Traditional Melody’, tunes such as FOREST GREEN (for ‘O little town of Bethlehem’), SHIPSTON (for ‘Firmly I believe and truly’), MONK'S GATE (for ‘He who would valiant be’) and KING'S LYNN (for ‘O God of earth and altar’). These were all new hymns, not found in any edition of Hymns Ancient and Modern: ‘O God of earth and altar’ had been written by G. K. Chesterton and published only the year before. Similarly, ‘Dear Lord and Father of mankind’ was extracted from W. Garrett Horder's Congregational Hymns of 1884. The hymns and tunes were not only original: Vaughan Williams claimed that it was ‘a moral rather than a musical issue’ to choose beautiful and noble music, and wrote of ‘the moral atmosphere implied by a fine melody’.658 ‘O little town of Bethlehem’ and ‘Dear Lord and Father of mankind’ were two examples of American hymns; Whittier had four hymns in The English Hymnal (none in the 1904 Hymns Ancient and Modern). The compilers had clearly been reading Horder's books, with their strong advocacy of American hymns: they printed his version of Lowell's poem, ‘Once to every man and nation’, together with three hymns by Samuel Longfellow and three by F. L. Hosmer (including ‘Thy kingdom come! on bended knee’, set to IRISH). They even printed five hot-gospelling hymns from Sacred Songs and Solos. At the same time, the book also reached back into an English tradition, with three translations from the work of the Venerable Bede (none of which proved very successful; St Patrick's Breastplate, from the early Irish and translated by Mrs Alexander, on the other hand, was a great success). There were seventy-two hymns and translations by J. M. Neale, and thirteen by Robert Bridges; ten hymns by Watts and twenty by Charles Wesley. The compilers even tried to launch a hymn by William Wordsworth. They had a brilliant success with Christina Rossetti's ‘In the bleak mid-winter’, for which Gustav Holst wrote a simple and superb tune, CRANHAM; and they tried other English poets, such as Spenser (‘Most glorious Lord of life, that on this day’), Blake (‘To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love’), and Tennyson (‘Strong Son of God, immortal Love’). They also printed the egalitarian hymn by Ebenezer Elliott, ‘When wilt thou save the people?’

657


658

‘Preface’, The English Hymnal, p. ix.

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The point of these examples is to show that the compilers of The English Hymnal had their eyes open. While the ten years of committee-work for Hymns Ancient and Modern had produced a book that only annoyed, the rapid assembling of The English Hymnal found many new texts and tunes which gave the book ‘youthful zest and sparkle’ (Routley's words).659 That zest was the more effective for being contained within a structure that emphasized traditional patterns of prayer and devotion: the book provided a Table of Office Hymns for all the Saints' Days in the Book of Common Prayer, and even the children's hymns were dignified by being placed in a section named ‘At Catechism’. Its clear relationship with the Church of England (it was described in the Preface as ‘a humble companion to the Book of Common Prayer for use in the Church’660) meant that, in spite of its liberal use of American hymns (including Unitarian ones), it had a very ‘English’ feel, especially with the tunes from English towns and villages which Vaughan Williams employed. This was important in an age when there was a good deal of speculation and introspection about England, Britain, and the Empire. Henry Scott Holland's ‘Judge eternal, throned in splendour’ was one example of the hymn of public concern that began to be written at this time, with its plea to the Judge to ‘purge this realm of bitter things’. The second verse paints a comprehensive picture of unease: Still the weary folk are pining For the hour that brings release: And the city's crowded clangour Cries aloud for sin to cease; And the homesteads and the woodlands Plead in silence for their peace. This is an odd verse, requiring a suspension of disbelief in order to take in the idea that through the noise of the city there is some yearning for a better world, and that nature joins in this yearning along with the villagers. The third verse, also, asks at one point for God to ‘cleave our darkness with thy sword’ and also to ‘feed the faint and hungry heathen’ (unbelievers in Britain, or overseas?) and ‘cleanse the body of this empire’, presumably the British Empire. Holland's hymn reflects a concern for social justice, and is clearly valuable on that account, but does so through a series of desperate stabs at the problem. Poets and hymn-writers seem to have had a vision of a country, and perhaps an empire, in which God would reign and dispense justice: but the very possession of that vision meant that they became acutely aware of a reality that was very different. It was, of course, the age of Elgar, and of ‘Land of hope and glory’, of the memory of Queen Victoria's long reign, and of a hope for the new century: it took one form

659

‘That Dreadful Red Book’, 83.

660

‘Preface’, The English Hymnal, p. iii.


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in the commitment of the whole country to God, as in Robert Bridges's ‘Rejoice, O Land, in God thy might’ (printed in The English Hymnal but not in Hymns Ancient and Modern): Glad shalt thou be, with blessing crown'd, With joy and peace thou shalt abound— The stately Miltonic inversions and the strong couplet rhymes are part of an impression of stability which Bridges was attempting to convey, tempering his pleasure with a certain sternness: Walk in his way, his word adore, And keep his truth for evermore. It was this love of a land which led Cecil Spring-Rice to write ‘I vow to thee, my Country, all earthly things above | Entire and whole and perfect, the service of my love’. Before that, however, there had been two hymns by distinguished poets which probed the complexities of national identity and the will of God more deeply. Just as Bridges had rejoiced and admonished at the same time in ‘Rejoice, O Land’, so Kipling and Chesterton responded to different occasions but identified similar problems (both ‘God of our fathers, known of old’ and ‘O God of earth and altar’ were used by the compilers of The English Hymnal). Kipling's ‘God of our fathers, known of old’, given the title ‘Recessional’, was written on the occasion of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1897, with special reference to the magnificent Imperial Procession and the Naval Review (‘our far-flung battle line’). It is a salutary warning—‘Lest we forget—lest we forget!’, repeated for emphasis and echo. What we are in danger of forgetting has to be deduced from the previous lines, for the last line of each verse (except the last) leaves the ‘forget’ hanging in the air. The danger (we deduce from what has been described) is that pride is a sin, that caught up in the pomp and circumstance of imperial tributes we may forget the need for God, the need to behave responsibly, the need to be humble. We are reminded in the first verse, with a characteristically skilful Kipling synecdoche (palm and pine, hot and cold, Egypt and Canada) that we hold Dominion over palm and pine but the second verse brilliantly uses the moment of the day after the procession to remind the reader that all such things pass away. The great procession is over, and what remains is (or should be) very different: The tumult and the shouting dies; The captains and the kings depart: Still stands thine ancient sacrifice, An humble and a contrite heart.

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The juxtaposition of Psalm 51 to the grandeur of 1897 sets the Diamond Jubilee against the ancient voice of wisdom: Far-called, our navies melt away; On dune and headland sinks the fire: Lo, all our pomp of yesterday Is one with Nineveh and Tyre! Judge of the Nations, spare us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget! The ‘yesterday’ is the very day of celebration, with its battleships and bonfires, now gone for ever into the past, that same past in which great empires and cities rose and fell. In the aftermath of the great day, Kipling invokes the salutary warning of history. The verse which follows, with its reference to Such boastings as the Gentiles use, Or lesser breeds without the Law— seems unacceptable, although it should be recognized that Kipling is only doing what hundreds of hymn-writers had done before him, seeing the British nation as a chosen people, the modern Israel, with responsibilities to match. Others are ‘outside the Law’, and therefore do not have its demands; but it is the pre-eminent duty of a chosen people not to forget God, and Kipling's hymn has a strong Old Testament ‘feel’ about it. Like the children of Israel, who were persistently warned not to forget God or neglect his laws, modern nations who put their trust in ‘reeking tube and iron shard’ will be destroyed. The Old Testament is full of such prophetic warnings, and of reminders of a time when the Jews turned away from God: Kipling implies that there is such a danger in the Diamond Jubilee celebrations, especially if they lead to boasting and folly: For frantic boast and foolish word Thy mercy on thy people, Lord! Kipling has the vatic power to assume the role that is granted to very few, that of the Old Testament prophet (beside his majestic instruction, Henry Scott Holland's verse sounds like pleading, or even whining). Similarly, Chesterton adopts the psalmist's voice (Psalm 86: 1) or that of Hezekiah: ‘Lord, bow down thine ear, and hear’ (2 Kings 19: 16). It is another hymn which implies, without stating it as openly as Kipling's, that there is a parallel between Britain and ancient Israel: it is time to resort to the kinds of prayer for the nation that are found in the Old Testament—this is the subtext of Chesterton's hymn. It speaks of a failure of leadership, a lack of direction, a love of money, and a lack of community. Chesterton's language is strongly figurative:


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The walls of gold entomb us, The swords of scorn divide, Take not thy thunder from us, But take away our pride. The second verse is a more detailed catalogue of social evils, including exploitation (or people in fear of anyone misusing authority), lies, and dishonour: from these Chesterton prays in the last line for deliverance. The tension builds up, with no less than six occurrences of ‘from’: From all that terror teaches, From lies of tongue and pen, From all the easy speeches That comfort cruel men, From sale and profanation Of honour and the sword, From sleep and from damnation, Deliver us, good Lord! The language is strangely oblique (‘sale’) and archaic (‘profanation of honour and the sword’). Chesterton is saying, with Burke, that the age of chivalry is dead, and that of economists and sophisters has succeeded it: but he does so in a language which contrasts with the shoddiness, and also pronounces upon it, with sweeping gestures that condemn the twentieth century. The result is a hymn which condenses a whole morality of social policy into three verses, without losing the general morality of a hymn by becoming involved with detail. Chesterton does not talk about politicians, or newspapers, or class distinction, but provides words that can be decoded readily; and in the third verse he does something which Kipling does not, putting forward his idea of a nation in peace and unity, with an end to division and with a burning faith. Then, instead of a drifting and divided people, there will be ‘a living nation’, not divided by the swords of scorn but ‘A single sword’ dedicated to God. The energy is to be driven outward, not destructively inward: the hymn is more political than Kipling's, more concerned with what is wrong with a class-ridden and divided society that has no values and no respect for religion. Kipling is more concerned with an attitude of mind manifested in a single event (from which the hymn is a ‘Recessional’). Chesterton is at once more precise and more archaic: Tie in a living tether The prince and priest and thrall, To describe the links that bind society together as ‘a living tether’ is extraordinary: it implies an enforced yoking, a kind of bondage to God, and the different orders of society—nobility, church, and poor (‘thrall’ = slave)—have got to be forced to understand one another:

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Bind all our lives together, Smite us and save us all; It is a drastic remedy, which does away with objections by using a sweeping vision: it sensibly refuses to become involved with detail, but provides messages which can be decoded into political and economic realities. Its American equivalent was Frank Mason North's hymn for the New York City Missionary and Church Extension Society, of which he was the Secretary, written two years before Chesterton's; but the crucial difference is that while Chesterton and Kipling were writing hymns with Old Testament themes and with an ancient voice, North is using the tender images of the New Testament and the person of Jesus: Where cross the crowded ways of life, Where sound the cries of race and clan, Above the noise of selfish strife, We hear Thy voice, O son of Man. The crowded ways cross, as they do at every intersection of New York City: there are the cries of many races, and there is a continuous noise. But North saw this as the place of modern Christianity, and portrayed his vision of Christ in the city. If the biblical stories suggest Christ in the countryside of Galilee, North pulls him into the modern urban situation: In haunts of wretchedness and need, On shadowed thresholds dark with fears, From paths where hide the lures of greed, We catch the vision of Thy tears. Like Chesterton, North is careful not to overstress the detail; but his hymn (which is not in The English Hymnal) is a fine example of a straightforward message delivered in strong Long Metre, the verses showing a division into two halves which supplement one another: O Master, from the mountain side, Make haste to heal these hearts of pain; Among these restless throngs abide, O tread the city's streets again: until, finally, the kingdom of God shall come on earth, and the earthly city will become the heavenly city: Till sons of men shall learn Thy love, And follow where Thy feet have trod; Till glorious from Thy heaven above, Shall come the City of our God. Many of the best-known hymns to have come out of this period were those of national and social concern. They reflected a discontent with the social situation, and yet also a hope that somehow, with an Old Testament warning


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or a New Testament application of the parable of the Good Samaritan, society could be made better. In itself, that reflected an innocence, of the kind that Philip Larkin identified in ‘MCMXIV’ (‘Never such innocence again’): there was even a kind of hope (found in the poetry of Rupert Brooke and others) that a war would somehow sort things out. It did not, of course: the Great War probably left people more confused and bewildered than ever, especially when the promised rewards failed to materialize. These were the years of The Waste Land (1922), which was an infinitely more complex statement of sterility, of a need for a new beginning, for death and rebirth, than Kipling's or Chesterton's hymns. Each of these authors, however, had a vision of the dry bones, of the word in the desert, of the roots that clutch the stony rubbish; and into that world came the boldest attempt by a hymnologist to confront the post-war scene, Percy Dearmer's Songs of Praise (1925).

Songs of Praise Dearmer had been General Editor of The English Hymnal, and Songs of Praise has some elements in common with the earlier book. He had claimed in the Preface to The English Hymnal that it was ‘not a party-book’; now he went one stage further, and tried to edit a book that was ‘not a single church book’. He described Songs of Praise as ‘a national collection of hymns for use in public worship’, and appealed over the heads of individual Churches to a common Christian goodwill. In earlier years, he said, hymnody had been ‘almost monopolized by the religious sects and parties’, and in the nineteenth century ‘hymnody was again in the hands of party managers, and the normal Englishman had little chance of being represented’.661 The new book was intended for this figure who was seen by Dearmer as ‘the normal Englishman’, decent, God-fearing, sensible, aesthetic up to a point, the kind of person who had been neglected for too long as the Churches drifted away from the people. Is it true’, asked Dearmer rhetorically in 1933, ‘that during the last eighty years the Churches have been gently singing themselves downhill?’662 If that eighty is taken precisely, the date arrived at is 1853; but there can be little doubt that Dearmer had in mind some mid-Victorian time around 1860–1, with all that followed it. Songs of Praise was a brave attempt to break out from the stranglehold of ‘official’ books that followed Hymns Ancient and Modern, to produce a ‘free’ hymn-book. Dearmer, a liberal theologian and Christian socialist, disliked sectarian strife, and it was to be a book ‘for all the Churches—not, indeed, for Lot's wife, but for the forward-looking people of every communion’.663

661

Dearmer, Songs of Praise Discussed, p. xxi.

662

Ibid. xxii.

663

Ibid. xxiv. Noting the succession of books put out by the Nonconformist churches, Dearmer thought that the Church of England was now ‘freer’ than the Free Churches in the matter of hymn-books.

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The reference to Lot's wife indicates Dearmer's concern to appeal to the young at heart. He had great hopes of the book in schools, hoping that it would be ‘not unacceptable to those who bear the responsibility of our national education’.664 As the author of ‘Jesu, good above all other’, he had a good touch with children's hymns, although he thought children should be taught to appreciate good hymnody generally: ‘Even young children should be brought up on the standard hymns, and it is supremely important that they should know and love the best hymns and tunes that are sung by adults.’665 What were those good hymns, according to Dearmer? The answer is an extremely interesting one in the light of the hymnological Darwinism discussed in Chapter 13 above. Dearmer himself was acutely aware of the struggle for survival in the over-populated hymn world. There were, he calculated, 400,000 hymns in use by the end of the nineteenth century; of those only sixteen were in all hymn-books, and fifty in each of the largest six. He identified ‘something like two hundred really fine hymns in common use’ together with ‘a considerable number more which are convenient’.666 Close interbreeding, Darwin had noted, diminished vigour and fertility; new forms became dominant because they had some advantage over older forms. Dearmer's book crossed a body of traditional hymnody with a wide variety of texts from the finest English lyric poetry that could be applied to religious purposes, to make a new kind of hymn-book, in which old hymns would be freshened by the new material brought in. It was a highly original venture: although the other editors were named as Ralph Vaughan Williams and Martin Shaw, Dearmer was primarily responsible for the texts. He disliked hymn-book committees, believing them to be too full of old men and too church-ridden:667 the selection was his own, often idiosyncratic, and generally ingenious. The result was a book that was (for a hymn-book) an astonishing anthology of English poetry. It included poets whom one would expect to find in any hymn-book: Wither, Vaughan, Herbert, Cowper, Smart, though some of these were ‘revived’ by Dearmer, such as the last-named. Then there were those whose work is not often found in hymn-books, but which fits in quite well—Blake (four examples), Coleridge, Sidney, Tennyson, Sir Thomas Browne, Spenser. Finally there were those whose work would not usually be thought suitable for a hymn-book: Shakespeare, Pope, Shelley, Thomas Campbell, Browning, Hardy, Matthew

664

Dearmer, Songs of Praise (1925), ‘Preface’, p. v.

665

Ibid.

666

Ibid., pp. iii–iv.

667

Songs of Praise Discussed, xxiv: ‘Neither poetry, prose, nor music can ever be successfully handled by committees, which always contain some elderly representatives whose minds linger in the memories of the past, and which also cannot meet continuously and must necessarily handle their business as business has to be handled, besides being held back in other ways that will be obvious to those who know a little of the inevitable character of ecclesiastical machinery.’


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Arnold, Clough, Swinburne, O'Shaughnessy. What Hardy (who was still alive) thought of his appearance in a hymnbook—alongside Bishop How—is not, so far as I know, recorded. What Shelley would have thought is difficult to imagine. Whatever their merits as poetry, they sit oddly in a hymn-book. They were often verses selected from longer poems, and have a curiously deracinated and truncated air about them, forlornly wondering if anyone will dare to try to sing them. The most extreme example of an unsuitable verse is probably from Browning's ‘Rabbi ben Ezra’, set to a seventeenth-century German tune, marked ‘Moderately Slow’—containing phrases such as ‘What strain o’ the stuff, what warpings past the aim!'—oblique and full of excitement, but hardly suitable for congregational singing. The reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement,668 while praising the book generally, rightly remarked a propos of such texts that the enthusiasm of the editors ‘has sometimes carried them too far’, citing Shakespeare, Swinburne, and Hardy as examples, while Arthur O'Shaughnessy's ‘With wonderful deathless ditties’ had ‘a mingled intensity and vagrancy of feeling which unfit it for use in any kind of formal devotion’. Another objection is that by putting these poems into a hymn-book the poems themselves change character. Subsumed into a Christian context, they lose their freedom, and find themselves subjected to an unwelcome closure of interpretation. Shelley's chorus from Hellas, for example, presumably now takes on a meaning connected with the final coming of the kingdom of God: The world's great age begins anew, The golden years return, The earth doth like a snake renew Her winter weeds outworn: Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam, Like wrecks of a dissolving dream. It is difficult to escape the feeling that on some occasions Dearmer would have been better with a committee to keep an eye on him. It was probably just about defensible to print Spenser's sonnet, ‘Most glorious Lord of life, that on this day’, following the example of The English Hymnal, but he had to go one better and put in a Shakespeare sonnet, ‘Poor Soul, the centre of my sinful earth’. In spite of these extremes, Songs of Praise was (and is) an attractive book, with an emphasis on youthful enthusiasm and social service that was fresh and unsentimental, and a liberal use of nature imagery. It was very successful in educational circles, and hundreds of thousands of English children learned to sing hymns from the blue-covered book on sunny mornings in

668

Times Literary Supplement, 25 Mar. 1926.

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school assemblies. Dearmer began it with a section on ‘Times and Seasons’, starting with Whittier's mysterious ‘All as God wills’, with its image of the windows of the heart opening to the day, and following it with hymns on Spring, May, Summer, Harvest, Autumn, and Winter. The hymns were not new (they included ones by Christopher Smart and John Newton) but their choice and their placing was: the first pages gave the book an entirely new sense of attending to things such as fresh air, weather, and the months of the year, independent of the Church calendar. It also had an important section for children (Dearmer rejected The English Hymnal's ‘At Catechism’ in favour of ‘For Children’) and for schools, including a school hymn from Loughborough Grammar School. But Dearmer's limitations are seen in his printing of H. C. Beeching's ‘God who created me’, with its celebration of an ideal healthy childhood (there is no room in Songs of Praise for the sick child) and Kipling's poem from Puck of Pook's Hill, ‘Land of our birth, we pledge to thee’: Teach us delight in simple things, And mirth that has no bitter springs; Forgiveness free of evil done, And love to all men 'neath the sun. Kipling's poem was one of many in the book that stressed service and international understanding: Dearmer was trying to break loose from the Church-centred hymnody of the late nineteenth century and find his way out to a wider humanity. So he printed, for example, Clifford Bax's grave and sonorous ‘Turn back, O Man, forswear thy foolish ways’, set to the OLD 124th. Bax said that he had written it in 1916, which adds a dreadful precision to the possible interpretations, although the general sense of wrongdoing in that forbidding first line is much wider than that. Bax describes the progress of human behaviour in imagery that suggests an involuntary destructive urge, a dreaming that is also a nightmare of conquest and imperialism, conducted in a haunted sleep: Earth might be fair and all men glad and wise. Age after age their tragic Empires rise, Built while they dream, and in that dreaming weep: Would man but wake from out his haunted sleep, Earth might be fair and all men glad and wise. Bax blends present and past in his hymn, turning finally to the future—‘Earth shall be fair, and all her people one’. It is a hope that was to find expression in the League of Nations, here given authority by the expression, the resounding grandeur of the ten-syllabled line, repeated at the end of the verse to give a five-line stanza, one more line than might have been expected. The repetition seals the verse, and underlines the first line with a new emphasis and a fuller understanding. In the same spirit, Laurence


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Housman wrote ‘Father eternal, Ruler of creation’ in 1919, with the refrain ‘Thy kingdom come, O Lord, thy will be done’: Races and peoples, lo we stand divided, And sharing not our griefs, no joy can share, By wars and tumults Love is mocked, derided, His conquering cross no kingdom wills to bear: Envious of heart, blind eyed, with tongues confounded, Nation by nation still goes unforgiven, Housman's cluttered verse was a brave attempt to write hymnody that was concerned with the age of the Treaty of Versailles; it appeared in the ‘International’ section of Songs of Praise (another of Dearmer's innovations). The success of the 1925 edition led to an enlarged version in 1931. Dearmer consulted widely over this revision, but seems nevertheless to have followed his own inclination, particularly by expanding the children's section and the hymns about nature. The number of Whittier's hymns was increased from nine to eleven, and there were four hymns by Eleanor Farjeon, including ‘Morning has broken’, fitting the Gaelic melody BUNESSAN: Morning has broken Like the first morning, Blackbird has spoken Like the first bird. Praise for the singing! Praise for the morning! Praise for them, springing Fresh from the Word! This was certainly an original and lively way of expressing praise to God the Creator: Dearmer loved such new expressions of old truths, and in the section for children he printed Christina Rossetti's ‘Who has seen the wind?’ and the two Czech carols, ‘The Birds' Carol’ (‘From out of a wood did a cuckoo fly’) and the ‘Rocking Carol’, as well as others that came fresh from his editing of the Oxford Book of Carols (1928) such as ‘The first Noel’ and ‘Unto us a boy is born’. His taste is shown revealingly in his introduction into the 1931 edition of no fewer than twelve hymns by Jan Struther (the pen-name of Joyce Placzek). She combined an interest in children and a lively technique with a love of natural beauty: High o'er the lonely hills Black turns to grey, Birdsong the valley fills, Mists fold away;

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Grey wakes to green again, Beauty is seen again— Gold and serene again Dawneth the day. This is hymnody of the English water-colour, and even though it mentions ‘God's morn’ and ‘Christ the herald’ who make splendour and colour on earth, the theology is an incidental extra to the natural description, much as it had been nearly a century before in Lynch's The Rivulet. Struther was the poet of this natural beauty (‘Daisies are our silver’) but also of heroism and knightly conduct. She turned St Stephen, the first Christian martyr, into ‘a knight without a sword’, and enjoyed transferring the old stories into conflicts with evil: When a knight won his spurs, in the stories of old, He was gentle and brave, he was gallant and bold; With a shield on his arm and a lance in his hand For God and for valour he rode through the land. Dearmer seems to have swallowed this embarrassing stuff with enthusiasm, carried away, no doubt, by Struther's buoyant energy. She did have original things to say—her hymn for St Bartholomew is strikingly different from most hymns for saints, if only because it acknowledges that no one knows anything about him: O saint of summer, what can we sing for you? How can we praise you, what can we bring for you? Lost are your words, your deeds are nameless, Saint without history, mute and fameless. Like the ‘days of old when knights were bold’ hymn, this one prattles along to its line-endings, but it does have a meditation on transience and fame; while ‘Lord of all hopefulness’, was, according to Dearmer, a favourite with university students of the time.669 It boldly (though improperly) rhymes ‘faith’ with ‘lathe’: Lord of all eagerness, Lord of all faith, Whose strong hands were skilled at the plane and the lathe, Be there at our labours, and give us, we pray, Your strength in our hearts, Lord, at the noon of the day. ‘Eagerness’ is a poor word here, quite unrelated to the drudgery of work, and the other lines, struggling towards the rhymes, show Struther's limitations. Her concern with work, however idealized, was nevertheless one of the manifestations of the Church's concern with society—notably demonstrated in the Conference on Politics, Economics, and Citizenship of

669

Songs of Praise Discussed, 301.


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1924—reflected in Songs of Praise. Dearmer, who was a member of the Christian Social Union, thought that in C.O.P.E. C. ‘the whole Christian Church has grappled with the social problem in earnest’.670 He later went on to edit Christianity and the Crisis, a series of essays on the economic depression of the 1930s. Even so, the period between the wars was an uneasy time, with the General Strike of 1926, the collapse of the economy, the abdication crisis, and the growing threat of Fascism. ‘It was’, said Roger Lloyd, ‘a strain to be a citizen and a churchman.’671 Something of this strain emerges in the almost defiant idiosyncrasy of Songs of Praise: and Dearmer's Preface to the ‘Enlarged Edition’ of 1931 shows that he was well aware of the difficulties of producing a relevant hymn-book in an age of Church decline. ‘Our advisers and we ourselves’, he wrote, have borne well in mind the fact that our churches, both Anglican and Free Church, have alienated during the last half-century much of the strongest character and intelligence of the Nation by the use of weak verse and music, and that the process of attraction or repulsion takes place every time a service is held.672 At least Dearmer was engaging with the world. Other books of this period, such as the Church Hymnary of 1927 or the Methodist Hymn Book of 1933 were much more concerned (as Hymns Ancient and Modern had been) to be of service to the Church.673 Nothing like Dearmer's book appeared again until the BBC Hymn Book of 1951. The provenance of the BBC Hymn Book was symptomatic of one of the great changes of these years. In Songs of Praise Discussed Dearmer had observed that some hymns had become known through ‘the wireless’, and the 1951 book was the culmination of a process—undenominational, educative, and undogmatic—which had been going on since the 1920s. The broadcasting of services such as the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from King's College, Cambridge, helped to popularize carols old and new; and other broadcast services, less spectacularly, helped to familiarize people with hymns from outside their own church traditions. The BBC Hymn Book was forward-looking traditional. It began, as Songs of Praise had done in 1925, with Whittier's ‘All as God wills, and it popularized a certain number of new hymns and tunes, such as Timothy Rees's ‘God is love: let heaven adore him’, set to a fine tune by one of the compilers, Cyril Taylor, called ABBOT'S LEIGH. It contained a Canadian hymn by R. B. Y. Scott, ‘O Day of God, draw nigh’, and a poem by John

670

E. R. Norman, Church and Society in England, 1770–1970 (Oxford, 1976), 180 ff.

671

Roger Lloyd, The Church of England in the Twentieth Century (London, 1950), 9.

672

‘Preface’, Songs of Praise, p. iii.

673

The Methodist Hymn Book was a special case, because it was designed to unite the different churches of the denomination (Wesleyan Methodists, United Methodists, Primitive Methodists) which united in 1932.

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Clare, ‘A stranger once did bless the earth’. It introduced a new American translation of the Didache by F. Bland Tucker, and Norman Cocker's tune RIPPONDEN, set to ‘For those we love within the veil’. And just as 1931 was the era of Eleanor Farjeon and Jan Struther, so 1951 was the era of C. A. Alington, Dean of Durham, several of whose hymns were found in the book. More unexpectedly, there was a hymn by the poet Andrew Young, and three by John Arlott, broadcaster and cricket commentator, on the subjects of Rogation and Harvest.

Postscript: The Hymn ‘Explosion’ The BBC Hymn Book, and Congregational Praise, which appeared in the same year, were the last of the traditional hymnbooks (Hymns Ancient and Modern Revised had appeared in 1950), with the possible exception of the Church Hymnary, third edition, which was published in 1973. After that there occurred a whole new wave of hymn-writing (sometimes described as the hymn ‘explosion’674), encouraged by a bewildering multitude of new hymn-books and supplements. It is too early to judge what the long-term effects will be; and the amount of material is so great that it would be impossible to discuss it critically without writing another book. It is a sign of creative energy that is greatly to be welcomed, and there is no doubt that some examples are fit to take their place as permanent additions to the hymn repertoire. Others show signs of being ephemeral. There is nothing surprising in this: there have always been hymns that survived, and others that disappeared. Darwinism, in hymnology as in nature, is a relentless force, and it is possible that the next great climatic changes have only just begun. The world has changed so fast since 1950 that it is not surprising that hymn-writing has changed also. It has become much newer, a reflection of the way in which cultural changes have become more rapid in an age of instant communication; it has become much more international, reflecting the way in which the telephone and the television have turned the world into a global village; and it has become much more ecumenical, reflecting the need of the churches to come together in the face of an indifferent and secular society. In one—superficial—sense, there has been plenty of space for new hymns, because there have been unprecedented opportunities for printing them. The 1960s saw the publication of a number of supplements to existing denominational books, and the 1980s saw the arrival of new full-scale hymnals. In another, deeper sense, there has been an acute lack of

674

See Eric Sharpe, ‘The explosive years for hymnody in Britain’, Bulletin of the Hymn Society, 153 (Jan. 1982), 9–20.


531

space, because so much has already been said. If the hymn-writer uses traditional themes, the hymn ends up saying what has been said before; if he or she tries to explore new themes and new idioms, to use hymns to cut into the current situation, there is a danger that the hymn will seem contrived, working desperately against the accumulated tradition. The most obvious example of this is Richard Jones's ‘God of concrete, God of steel’, which was very popular in the 1960s but which now seems dated: it was a bold attempt to do for hymn-writing what Stephen Spender's pylons did for 1930s poetry. Similarly, Fred Kaan reaches across what seems an almost unbridgeable gap between hymnody and the world, calling his people to ‘sing and live Magnificat | In crowded street and council flat’. The versification of such commendable statements is connected with a view of the Church as a force for good in the world, with Fred Pratt Green's concept of it as ‘a Base for Operations in the world as well as an Ark of Safety for the faithful’.675 This idea of the Church as a base for operations is fine (if uninspirational) so long as the instructions to the operators do not become too depressingly critical of the mainstream religious tradition. This is the danger of the folkhymn, popularized by writers such as Sydney Carter; but his warning might be applied to other hymns of social service written during the last thirty years. There has been a lot that has been earnest, but not much that has been enjoyable or inspirational, with the exception of hymns such as Carter's ‘Lord of the dance’ and Timothy Dudley-Smith's magnificent ‘Tell out my soul, the greatness of the Lord’. The over-solemnity of much modern hymnody has led to a flight to choruses by some Churches, although there are other reasons for the popularity of hymns written for a Light Music style (by, for example, Geoffrey Beaumont and Patrick Appleford), such as the wish to enliven a perceived dullness in worship. Albert Bayly, whose ‘Rejoice, O people, in the mounting years’ was printed in the BBC Hymn Book, was the link man between serious modern hymn-writers and the great tradition. He was felicitously described by Cyril Taylor as ‘the last of the old and the first of the new’,676 and his hymns on scientific subjects, such as ‘O Lord of every shining constellation’ are commendable attempts to address the gap between religion and science. To his example must be added those who met at a Scottish retreat house in Dunblane in 1960 and produced Dunblane Praises (1962) and Dunblane Praises II (1964). They have had many successors—the hymn-writing industry is flourishing, encouraged by competitions, broadcasts, and prizes—but in Great Britain five stand out: Timothy Dudley-Smith, Fred Pratt Green, Fred Kaan, Brian Wren, and Alan Gaunt (the American tradition is more diverse and lively). Each has tried, in his own way, to combine a

675

Fred Pratt Green, ‘Hymn Writing To-Day’, Bulletin of the Hymn Society, 120 (Jan. 1971), 122–4.

676

See the obituary in the Bulletin of the Hymn Society, 160 (May 1984), 202.

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recognition of the serious problems of the late twentieth century with a certain hope and inspiration. They may be seen as trying—perhaps too late—to close the gap between the Church and the World which began with William Walsham How and Christopher Wordsworth. It is too early to attempt an assessment of this modern hymnody, but its seriousness, its attention to detail, and its craftsmanship are all hopeful signs. The problem is likely to be that the Church of the twenty-first century will not want the good hymns of the twentieth, let alone those of the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries. The decline in church attendance, the absence of a body of well-known hymns from school assemblies, and the advent of choruses, suggest that the tradition of hymn-singing as a part of a religious culture in English-speaking countries may be coming to an end. I have written this book in the hope of earning some respect for the hymn while it is still a part of a popular culture, before it becomes a subject of study for Church historians and antiquarians. And if this book does anything to preserve the serious appreciation of hymns as literary texts and as aids to worship, and as poems that are beloved by people for whom religion is often foreign and abstruse, if it manages to slow down their disappearance in an age of neglect from outside the Church and from within it, then it will have been worth while.

Select Bibliography Primary Sources The following list indicates the texts which I have used for individual authors. For the general discussion of hymns I have used the texts in Hymns & Psalms (London, 1983) except where indicated. This is not, of course, a complete bibliography of hymnody. It includes only those books which I have seen and/or discussed in the present study. Aikin, A. L., Hymns in Prose for Children (London, 1781). Alexander, Cecil Frances: see Humphreys. Alford, Henry, Psalms and Hymns adapted to the Sundays and Holydays throughout the Year (London, 1844). Almond, R. W., Hymns, for Occasional Use in the Parish Church of St Peter, in Nottingham (Nottingham, 1819). Ancient and Modern, Hymns Ancient and Modern (London, 1861; with Appendix, 1868; 2nd edn., 1875; with Supplement, 1889; new edn., 1904). Barbauld, Anna Laetitia: see Aikin. Barnard, Samuel, Spiritual Songs for Zion's Travellers (Sheffield, 1803). Barton, William, The Book of Psalms in Metre (London, 1644). —— Hallelujah, or Certain Hymns (London, 1651). —— A Century of Select Hymns (London, 1659). —— Four Centuries of Select Hymns (London, 1668). —— Six Centuries of Select Hymns (London, 1688). Baxter, Richard, Poetical Fragments (London, 1681). —— Poetical Fragments [with ‘Additions’] (London, 1699). The Bay Psalm Book (Cambridge, Mass., 1729) [fac. repr., New York, 1903]. The BBC Hymn Book (London, 1951). Beeching, H. C., Lyra Sacra: A Book of Religious Verse (London, 1895). Bickersteth, Edward, Christian Psalmody (London, 1833). Bickersteth, E. H., The Hymnal Companion to the Book of Common Prayer (London, 1870). Bonar, H. N., Hymns by Horatius Bonar (London, 1904). Boyd, Zachary, The Psalmes of David in Meeter (Glasgow, 1648). Brady, Nicholas, and Nahum Tate, A New Version of the Psalms of David, Fitted to the Tunes used in Churches (1696, 2nd edn. , 1698). Bridges, Robert, and H. E. Wooldridge, The Yattendon Hymnal (Oxford, 1895–9).

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Brontë, Anne, The Poems of Anne Brontë, ed. Edward Chitham (London, 1979). Brontë, Emily, The Complete Poems of Emily Jane Brontë, ed. C. W. Hatfield (New York, 1941). Bunsen, C. C. J., Versuch eines allgemeinen evangelischen Gesang-und Gebetbuchs (Hamburg, 1833). Bunyan, John, John Bunyan: The Poems, ed. Graham Midgley (Oxford, 1980). Cadogan, W. B., Psalms and Hymns, Collected by the late W. B. Cadogan, M. A. (Reading, 1824). The Cambridge Hymnal (Cambridge, 1967). Caswall, Edward, Lyra Catholica (London, 1849). —— Hymns and Poems, Original and Translated (London, 1908). Chandler, John, The Hymns of the Primitive Church, now first Collected, Translated, and Arranged (London, 1837). The Christian Psalmist, by several clergymen (Liverpool, 1837). The Clarendon Hymn Book (Oxford, 1936). Cleveland, Charles Dexter, Lyra Sacra Americana (London, 1868). Conder, Josiah, The Congregational Hymn Book: A Supplement to Dr Watts's Psalms and Hymns (London, 1836). Cosin, John, A Collection of Private Devotions, ed. P. G. Stanwood and Daniel O'Connor (Oxford, 1967). Cotterill, T. (ed.), A Selection of Psalms and Hymns (Sheffield, 1819). Cowper, William, The Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper, ed. James King and Charles Ryskamp (Oxford, 1979). —— Olney Hymns (London, 1779). Crossman, Samuel, The Young Man's Meditation (London, 1664) [fac. repr., 1863]. Dearmer, Percy, et al., Songs of Praise (London, 1926; rev. and enlarged edn., 1932). Dix, William Chatterton, Altar Songs (Bristol, 1867). —— A Vision of All Saints (London, 1871). Doddridge, Philip, Hymns founded on various texts in the Holy Scriptures, by the late Reverend Philip Doddridge, D.D., ed. Job Orton (Salop, 1755). —— The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul (London, 1745). —— The Works of the Rev. Philip Doddridge, D.D. (Leeds, 1802). Donne, John, The Complete English Poems of John Donne, ed. C. A. Patrides (London, 1985). Ellerton, John, Hymns, Original and Translated (London, 1888). Ellerton, John, W. W. How, and Berdmore Compton, Church Hymns (London, 1871; music edn., ed. Arthur Sullivan, 1874). Elliott, Charlotte, Hours of Sorrow Cheered and Comforted (London, 1836). —— Morning and Evening Hymns for a Week (London, 1842). The English Hymnal (Oxford and London, 1906; rev. edn., 1933). Faber, Frederick William, Jesus and Mary; or, Catholic Hymns for Singing and Reading (London, 1849; 2nd edn., 1852). —— Hymns (rev. edn., London, 1861). Fox, W. J., Hymns and Anthems (Finsbury, 1841). Gadsby, William, Gadsby's Hymns, ed. J. Gadsby (London, 1882). Gibbons, Thomas, Hymns adapted to Divine Worship (London, 1769).

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Index Adams, John Quincey 464 Adams, Sarah Flower 429–30, 438 ‘Nearer, my God, to Thee’ 429–30, 460 Addison, Joseph 19, 102, 171–9, 196, 198, 206, 212, 219, 246, 267, 301, 391–2, 472, 484, 490 Ainsworth, Henry 56, 103, 109 Alexander, Cecil Frances 345, 367, 426, 430–6, 507, 517 Alford, Henry 337–8, 398 Alger, William Rounseville 464 Alington, C. A. 530 Almond, R. W. 267 Ancient and Modern, Hymns 339, 340–1, 373, 385, 386–98, 400, 419, 421, 511, 515–19, 523 Appleford, Patrick 531 Arlott, John 530 Arnold, Matthew 328, 347, 364, 366, 404, 524 Augustine, Saint 2, 209 Austin, John 206 Bach, Johann Sebastian 419, 512 Bacon, Leonard 463 Baker, Sir Henry Williams 31, 332, 387–92, 399, 421 Bakhtin, Mikhail 15, 21 Barbauld, Anna Laetitia 307 Barton, William 104–5, 137, 165 Baur, Ferdinand Christian 395, 488 Bax, Clifford 526 Baxter, Richard 35, 43, 61, 64, 76, 82, 86 n., 87, 107, 114–21, 123, 131, 134, 144, 151–2, 163, 166, 185, 212, 218, 320 Bay Psalm Book 107–8, 461 Bayly, Albert 531 Beattie, James 425 Beaumont, Geoffrey 531 Beckett, Samuel 354 Beddome, Benjamin 198–202, 290 Bede, the Venerable 517 Beeching, H. C. 513 n., 526 Bennett, William Sterndale 419; The Chorale Book for England 419–21 Berkeley, George 180, 182, 201, 254 Beveridge, William 102 Bickersteth, E. H. 359, 398 Bickersteth, Edward 388 Binney, Thomas 486–8, 514 Blackmore, Sir Richard 98, 281 Blair, Robert 186 n. Blake, William 18, 54, 136, 147, 160, 229, 230, 262, 285, 300, 302, 318, 507, 517

Bliss, P. P. 491, 494, 495–6 Bonar, Horatius 359, 502–5, 507 Bonner, Carey 509 Bourignon, Antoinette 213 Bourne, G. H. 397 Bowden, J. W. 355 n. Bowring, Sir John 303 Boyle, Robert 20, 133–4 Brady, Nicholas 7, 98–102, 212, 231; A New Version of the Psalms of David , see Tate Brevint, Daniel 327–8 Bridges, Robert 419, 511–15, 516, 517, 519; Yattendon Hymnal 510, 512–15, 516 Brontë, Anne 424, 453–4 Brontë, Charlotte 422 Brontë, Emily 424, 452–3, 455 Brooke, Rupert 523 Brooks, Phillips 470–1 Brown, John, vicar of Newcastle 229 Brown, Phoebe 462 Browne, Sir Thomas 174, 524 Browning, Robert 276, 395, 451, 524, 525 Bruce, Michael 502 Bryant, William Cullen 474 Buchanan, George 144 Bunsen, C. C. J. 411, 413, 417 Bunyan, John 76, 110, 121–7, 189, 224, 288, 506; The Pilgrim's Progress 121–7, 141, 224, 288 Burke, Edmund 55, 324, 521 Burnet, Gilbert 134 Burns, Robert 502 Burton, Henry 82

548

INDEX

Butler, Josephine 437 Byrom, John 267–8, 269 Byron, George Gordon, Lord 305, 322 Calvin, John 20, 43, 44, 46, 47, 54, 57, 68 Cameron, William 502 Campbell, John 489–90 Campbell, Thomas 302, 524 Campion, Edmund 366 Carlyle, Thomas 409–11 Carter, Sydney 531 Caswall, Edward 339, 368–73, 388, 389, 490, 509 Cennick, John 266, 269, 270–1, 335 Chadwick, J. W. 471 Chandler, J. 289 Chesterton, G. K. 393, 517, 520–2 Church Hymns (1871) 398, 511 Clare, John 302, 530 Clarke, James Freeman 464, 477 Clephane, E. C. 423 Cleveland, Charles Dexter 468 n., 486 Clough, Arthur Hugh 397, 525 Cocker, Norman 530 Coffin, Charles 389 Colenso, Bishop 344, 393 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 13, 15–16, 40, 287, 300–2, 304, 320, 325, 327–8, 408, 473; Aids to Reflection 301–2, 325; ‘Hymn before Sunrise’ 301; The Statesman's Manual 13 Collier, Jeremy 144 Collins, Anthony 180 Compton, Berdmore 398, 400 Conder, Joan 423–4 Conder, Josiah 335–6, 338, 339; The Congregational Hymn Book 339, 423 Conrad, Joseph 284–5 Cosin, John 41, 82–6, 103, 379 Cosnett, Elizabeth 11 n. Coverdale, Miles 49, 52, 54, 107 Cowper, William 2–3, 10, 11, 80, 201, 202, 265, 266, 282–3, 288–99, 306, 317, 363, 365, 378, 400, 453, 462, 472, 490, 524; Olney Hymns , seeNewton Cox, Frances E. 339, 411–13, 414 Coxe, Arthur Cleveland 475 Cromwell, Oliver 53, 104, 115 Crosby, Fanny 491, 496–7, 501 Crossman, Samuel 76, 82, 86–90, 161, 166, 245 Crüger, Johann 419 Curtis, John 336 Darwin, Charles 341–5, 497; The Origin of Species 340–5, 524 Davidson, Margaret Miller 424 Davies, Sir John 103 Davies, Samuel 462

Davison, W. H. 342 Dearmer, Percy 276 n., 399, 505, 515, 516–17, 523–9; Songs of Praise 345, 523–9 Defoe, Daniel 227, 255 Denham, Sir John 174 Denton, W. 387 Derrida, Jacques 23–4 De Santeuil, J. B. 389 Dessler, Wolfgang Christian 224 n. Dickens, Charles 352–3 Dickinson, Emily 8, 16 Dix, William Chatterton 35, 389, 390, 399, 403–5, 408 Doane, George Washington 340, 478 Doane, W. H. 342 Dod, Henry 103 Doddridge, Philip 17 n., 19, 32–3, 136, 175, 179–90, 191, 195, 198, 199, 200, 219, 254, 266, 283, 290, 297, 388, 462, 490, 512 Donne, John 45, 63, 69–70, 74, 83, 98, 133, 147, 165 Douglass, Frederick 498 Drabble, Margaret 6 Dryden, John 12, 98, 134, 191, 207, 215, 247, 253, 256 Dudley-Smith, Timothy 28, 345, 531 Duncan, Mary 426 Dwight, Timothy 461, 477 Dykes, John Bacchus 390, 420, 505, 512 Dykes, Rian A. 490 Ebeling, J. G. 419 Edwards, Jonathan 461 Eliot, George 5–6, 7, 336–7, 366, 422, 437 Eliot, T. S. 25, 40, 162, 223, 225, 395; The Waste Land 523 Ellerton, John 38, 332, 393, 397, 398, 399–403, 408, 507; ‘The day Thou gavest’ 38–40, 317 Elliott, Charlotte 425, 427–9 Elliott, Ebenezer 517 Elliott, Emily 426 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 466 English Hymnal, The 515–19, 523 Everest, Charles William 340, 478 Faber, F. W. 332, 360–8, 373 Farjeon, Eleanor 527 Farrer, Austin 16 Ferrar, Nicholas 60 Findlater, Sarah Laurie 411 Flint, James 464 Fraunce, Abraham 103

INDEX

Freud, Sigmund 497 Freylinghausen, Johann A. 205 Froude, Hurrell 355 Gaskell, Elizabeth C. 413, 422 Gaskell, William 413 Gaunt, Alan 531 Gay, John 228 Gellert, C. F. 412 Gerhardt, Paul 205, 209, 210–11, 255 n., 413, 414 German Hymns 205–14, 408–21 Gibbons, Orlando 36, 59, 512 Gibbons, Thomas 146 Gilby, Anthony 44, 162 Goffe, Eliza Fanny 424 Goldschmidt, Otto 419 Googe, Barnaby 45 Goss, Sir John 348 Grant, James 489 Grant, Sir Robert 303–4, 502 Gray, Thomas 191, 197, 300, 306 Greatheed, Samuel 290 Green, Fred Pratt 35, 531 Greenwell, Dora 332, 436–41, 478 Grundtvig, N. F. S. 23 Hall, Robert 199 Hankey, Katherine 493 Hardy, Thomas 6–7, 98, 102, 290, 333, 395, 422, 490, 524, 525 Hart, Horace 512 Hart, Joseph 266, 269, 271–3, 335 Havergal, Frances Ridley 332, 424, 441–5 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 474 Hazlitt, William 305 Heber, Reginald 6, 301, 302–3, 304, 320–5, 326, 327, 334, 336, 345, 367, 388, 391, 400, 404, 453 Heine, Heinrich 408 Herbert, George 10, 60, 67, 68, 69, 70–6, 79, 87, 88, 91, 94, 97, 110, 116–17, 133, 144, 163, 164, 165, 166, 175, 199, 206, 214, 245, 280, 295, 299, 307–8, 309–10, 391–2, 512, 524 Hickes, George 206 Hoatson, Florence 509 Hogarth, William 101, 227, 228, 229 Holland, Henry Scott 518 Holmes, Oliver Wendell 463, 468–9, 472, 475, 483 Holst, Gustav 517 Hooker, Richard 82 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 2–3, 31, 297, 360, 487, 514 Hopkins, John 7, 41, 42, 43, 50, 52, 100, 101, 103, 107, 231; ‘Old Version’ , see Sternhold Hosmer, F. L. 469, 517 Housman, Laurence 527 How, William Walsham 395, 398, 400, 405–7, 490, 511, 525,

549 532 Howe, John 134 Howe, Julia Ward 475–7 Howley, William 302 Hughes, Ted 26 Hunnis, William 103 Hymnal Noted 377–8, 379, 398 Ingelow, Jean 531 Jeffrey, Francis 305 Johnson, Samuel (1709–84) 1, 4, 15, 20, 137, 203 Johnson, Samuel (1822–82) 466–7 Johnston, Arthur 144 Jones, John 269 Jones, Richard 531 Jones William 204 Jonson, Ben 23, 64, 69, 85 Kaan, Fred 531 Keach, Benjamin 76, 110–14, 116, 117 Keats, John 276, 318, 443 Keble, John 304, 326–34, 345, 355 n., 356, 373, 385, 386, 388, 426; The Christian Year 328–34; Lyra Innocentium 361, 426 n.; Praelectiones 327–9 Kelly, Thomas 121, 395–6, 404, 453, 512 Ken, Thomas 41, 82, 93–7, 267, 280, 389, 506, 512 Kethe, William 43, 51, 54, 104, 304 Kipling, Rudyard 519–21, 526 Knox, John 103 Lamb, Charles 62, 67 Lange, Ernst 206–8, 214 Larcom, Lucy 474 Larkin, Philip 6, 523 Law, William 324 Lawrence, D. H. 7 Leeson, Jane 426 Leighton, Archbishop 301 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 23 Locke, John 136 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth 467–8 Longfellow, Samuel 466–7, 472, 475, 517 Lorrain, Claude 173 Lowell, James Russell 469, 474, 517 Lowell, Robert 3–4, 15, 204 Lowth, Robert 33 Luke, Jemima 426

550

INDEX

Luther, Martin 42, 162, 408–11, 413, 414, 415; ‘Ein feste Burg’ 42, 408–11 Lynch, Thomas Toke 488–90; The Rivulet 488–90, 528 Lyte, Henry Francis 332, 346–54, 391, 408, 478, 490; ‘Abide with me’ 350–4, 478, 512; The Spirit of the Psalms 339, 348–50, 389 Mackenzie, Henry 298 Madan, Martin 178, 265, 266, 269, 270, 275, 378; A Collection of Psalms and Hymns 266 Manning, Bernard 11, 217, 219 Mant, Richard 373, 398 Marckant, John 43 Marlow, Isaac 111 Marot, Clement 42, 43, 50 Marriott, Charles 358 Martin, John 324 Martineau, James 387, 392, 413 Marvell, Andrew 76, 298 Mason, John 82, 90–3, 245 Mason, Lowell 465 Massie, Richard 411, 415 Mather, Cotton 109 Matheson, George 505–6 Melville, Herman 474 Mercer, William 338, 340, 388; Church Psalter and Hymn Book 340, 388 Merrick, James 281, 306 Milman, Henry Hart 320, 325–6, 334, 391, 398 Milton, John 12, 66–7, 104–9, 124, 144, 162, 210, 215, 231, 246, 247, 253, 256, 267–8, 276, 306, 312–13, 329, 513–15; Paradise Lost 247, 312–13; Samson Agonistes 246 Monk, William Henry 34, 351, 388, 389, 395, 420, 512 Monsell, J. S. B. 30, 33, 398, 399, 408 Montague, Anna 422, 426–7 Montgomery, James 6, 30, 37, 96 n., 137, 152, 178–9, 224, 225, 275, 303, 304–21, 322, 326, 327, 335, 388, 389, 453, 462; The Christian Psalmist 6, 30, 37, 96 n., 178–9, 224, 225, 275 Moody, Dwight L. 339, 490–7 Moore, Thomas 302 Moravian Hymns 205–6, 208–9, 305 More, Henry 134, 214, 217 Morison, John 389, 502 Murdoch, Iris 6 Murray, F. H. 387 Naylor, E. W. 34 Neale, John Mason 4, 27–8, 339, 373–86, 388, 389, 394, 408, 419, 490, 517; Carols for Christmastide 382; Carols for Eastertide 382; Hymns, chiefly Mediaeval 376, 378; Hymns of the Eastern Church 4, 382–6; Hymns for the Sick 373–6; Short Commentary on the Hymnal Noted 378–82 Neander, Joachim 417, 419, 514

Nettleton, Asahel 462; Village Hymns 462 Neumark, Georg 416, 419 Newman, John Henry 36, 327, 328, 334, 355 n., 356–60, 361, 368, 374, 426 & n.; ‘Lead, kindly light’ 36, 356–8, 390, 399; ‘Praise to the holiest’ 359–60, 390 Newton, Isaac 20, 133–4, 136, 177 Newton, John 91, 122, 199, 201, 265, 266, 282–8, 289, 292, 299, 378, 452, 462, 526; Olney Hymns 267, 282–99 Nicolai, Philipp 419, 420 Noel, Caroline M. 424 North, Frank Mason 522 Norton, Thomas 43, 50, 52 Olivers, Thomas 269–70 & n. Orton, Job 182, 183, 185 O'Shaughnessy, A. 525 Ovid (P. Ovidius Naso) 136, 247 n. Palmer, George Herbert 515 Palmer, Ray 465 Parker, Matthew 103 Parry, C. H. H. 483, 517 Pater, Walter 511 Patrick, John 152, 281 Peabody, William 473 Pembroke, Mary Herbert, Countess of 45, 103 Penn, William 132 Plumptre, E. H. 394 Pope, Alexander 13, 191, 196, 207, 210, 224, 249–51, 253, 254, 256, 276, 306, 524 Pott, Francis 398, 399 Pound, Ezra 256 Prior, Matthew 210, 247–9; Solomon 247–8 Procter, Adelaide Anne 332, 451–2 Prynne, William 82 Pugin, A. W. 364 Pullain, John 43, 51–2, 68, 87 Purcell, Henry 34, 247 Pusey, Philip 344, 394–5 Putnam, Alfred P. 471–2 Puttenham, George 47–8, 50, 53; The Arte of English Poesie 48, 50, 53

INDEX

Racine, Jean 187, 190 Ransom, John Crowe 27 Ray, John 134 Rees, Bryn 37 Rees, Timothy 529 Riley, Athelstan 517 Rinckart, Martin 418 Rippon, John 199, 266; A Selection of Hymns 127 n., 199, 266, 335 n. Robinson, Robert 265, 269, 273–4, 281 Rossetti, Christina 452, 456–60, 517, 527 Rothe, Johann Andreas 211–12, 219 Rous, Francis 103–4 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 23, 24 Routley, Erik 9, 25, 27 Ruskin, John 507, 511 Sampson, George 4, 12 Sankey, Ira D. 486, 490–7; Sacred Songs and Solos 486, 490–7, 517 Sarbiewski, Casimire 144, 164 Saussure, Ferdinand de 23 Savoy Conference 86 n., 115 Schaff, Philip 465 Scheffler, Johann 205, 213 Schenk, H. T. 412 Scott, R. B. Y. 529 Scott, Walter 322, 325, 425 Scottish Psalter 43 Scudder, Eliza 472 Sears, Edmund H. 470 Sergeant, Adeline 424 Shakespeare, William 12, 14, 67, 83, 106, 190, 210, 291, 402, 448, 524, 525 Shaw, Martin 524 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 301, 304–5 & n., 318, 463, 524, 525; Prometheus Unbound 314 Shklovsky, Viktor 18 Sidney, Sir Philip 45, 47, 71, 103, 524 Sigourney, Lydia Huntley 467, 472, 492 Singer, Elizabeth (‘Mrs Rowe’) 339 Smart, Christopher 276–82, 524, 526; Hymns and Spiritual Songs 277–82; Jubilate Agno 276, 278; The Psalms of David 281–2; A Song to David 276 Smith, Samuel F. 463, 473 Southey, Robert 206, 304, 306, 322, 325, 422 Southwell, Robert 273, 366 Spangenberg, August Gottlieb 208 Spender, Stephen 531 Spenser, Edmund 12, 48, 106, 247 n., 517, 524, 525 Spitta, C. J. P. 411 Sprat, Thomas 98

551 Spring-Rice, Cecil 519 Spurgeon, Charles Haddon 202, 339 Stainer, Sir John 34 Stanford, C. V. 407 Steele, Anne 190–8, 199, 340, 345, 422, 462 Stennett, Joseph 127–32, 184, 202 Stennett, Samuel 202–3 Sternhold, Thomas 7, 41, 42–3, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 54–5, 100, 101, 103, 107, 144, 231, 292; ‘Old Version’ 7, 41, 42–56, 57, 60, 100–1, 109, 121, 265, 281, 339, 341 Stone, Samuel 344, 393–4 Stowe, Harriet Beecher 133, 472, 478–9, 485 Struther, Jan (Joyce Plaz¢ek) 527–8 Sullivan, Sir Arthur 398 Surrey, Henry Howard, Earl of 103 Swinburne, A. C. 525 Sylvester, Joshua 106–7 Sylvester, Matthew 116 Tallis, Thomas 512 Tappan, William B. 462 Tate, Nahum 98–102, 212, 231; A New Version of the Psalms of David 7, 98–102, 153, 155, 156, 166, 265, 281, 461 Tayler, John James 413 Taylor, Ann and Jane 426, 506 Taylor, Cyril 529, 531 Tennyson, Alfred Lord 1, 351–2, 395, 492, 517, 524 Tersteegen, Gerhard 205, 209–10 Thomson, James 196 Thring, Godfrey 396–7, 398, 399, 404 Tillotson, John, Archbishop 134, 180 Tollett, Elizabeth 339 Tomlinson, Charles 30 Toplady, Augustus Montagu 156, 178, 266, 267, 269, 274–5, 276, 308, 321, 378; Psalms and Hymns 266; ‘Rock of Ages, cleft for me’ 28, 37–8, 274–5 Traherne, Thomas 175 Tucker, F. Bland 530 Tyndale, William 44 Unwin, Mary 294–5 Unwin, Morley 265 Usher, James 134 Vaughan, Henry 74, 76–80, 175, 358, 524 Vaughan, Thomas 77 Vaughan Williams, Ralph 407, 505, 515, 517–8, 524

552

INDEX

Wainwrig`ht, John 268 Walpole, Sir Robert 227 Walton, Izaak 69, 71, 94 Ware, Henry, Jr. 463–4 Waring, Anna Laetitia 425, 446–51 Warton, Thomas 47, 55 Watts, Isaac 1, 2, 10, 17 n., 19, 22–3, 24, 25, 32, 43, 67, 87, 91, 92, 102, 116, 131, 133–70, 179, 182, 183, 185, 189, 190, 192, 193, 195, 197, 202, 203, 206, 208, 212, 214, 215, 218, 222, 225, 231, 233, 239, 243–5, 266, 267, 269, 281, 290, 297, 298, 300, 301, 316, 343, 363, 385, 388, 400, 431, 453, 461, 462, 472, 479, 490, 506, 512, 514, 517; Horae Lyricae 143–8, 149; Hymns and Spiritual Songs 148–52; The Psalms of David 152–60, 281; ‘When I survey the wondrous cross’ 160–70 Webb, Benjamin 380–1 Wesley, Charles 9 n., 14–15, 18, 20, 28, 31–2, 34, 38, 80, 91, 178, 179, 182, 190, 198, 214, 218, 219, 221–64, 265, 266, 275, 280, 285, 296, 298, 299, 300, 313, 314, 315, 316, 321, 338, 343, 344, 345, 363, 364, 367, 379, 385, 388, 389, 400, 404, 453, 462, 492, 496–7, 506, 507–8, 512, 514, 517; and the Bible 230–3; and the Book of Common Prayer 233–43; ‘conversion hymn’ 221–2, 226–9; and other hymnwriters 243–6; and other poets 246–55 Wesley, John 9–10, 11, 47, 76, 178, 205–21, 243, 265, 268–9, 282, 299, 327, 339, 343, 389, 408, 414; A Collection of Hymns, for the Use of the People called Methodists (1780) , 208, 217–21, 336; A Collection of Psalms and Hymns (1737) 206, 265 Wesley, Samuel 210, 219 Wesley, Samuel Sebastian 393 Whitefield, George 265, 266, 461; A Collection of Hymns for Social Worship 265 Whittier, John Greenleaf 472, 473, 476, 479–85, 498, 517, 526, 527, 529 Whittingham, William 43, 49, 70, 104, 121, 391 Wilkins, John 144 William of Orange 188 Williams, Isaac 329, 355 and n., 356; The Cathedral 356, 360 Williams, William 275–6; ‘Guide me, O Thou great Jehovah’ 37, 275–6 Winkworth, Catherine 339, 388, 408, 411 n., 413–21, 427; The Chorale Book for England 419–21; Lyra Germanica 413–17, 418; Lyra Germanica, Second Series 417–19 Winkworth, Susanna 413, 427 Winnicott, D. W. 6 Wither, George 43, 45, 56, 57–69, 103, 104, 155, 164, 231, 280, 524; Britain's Remembrancer 61; Haleluiah or, Britain's Second Remembrancer 61–7, 155; Hymnes and Songs of the Church 57–61; The Psalmes of David 57, 103; The Schollers Purgatory 58, 60, 103

Woodd, Basil 102 Woodford, James Russell 396–7, 398 Wooldridge, H. E. 512, 516 Wordsworth, Christopher 398, 407–8, 511, 532 Wordsworth, William 141, 160, 175, 276, 286, 290, 303, 304, 306, 320, 328, 330, 333–4, 358, 364, 468, 483, 517; Lyrical Ballads 141, 306 Wren, Brian 531 Wyatt, Sir Thomas 45, 70, 103 Xavier, St Francis 372 Yonge, Francis Mary 332, 426 Young, Edward 251–3; Night Thoughts 251–3 Zinzendorf, Nicholas von 205, 206, 209, 213 n.

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