Читать книгу The Hymn as Literature - Jeremiah Bascom Reeves - Страница 17

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The very effective first three stanzas would doubtless have been accepted and Herrick forgiven, if they were not logically incomplete without the impossible fourth and following stanzas. Objection to a doctor’s potions would be no subject for the assembled faithful to incorporate into song. The hymn-book has no time for the incongruous or trifling. It is straightaway and brief in manner, for it must be about its earnest business.

“A truly spiritual taste,” said John Billinsby in his edition of D. Burgess’s “Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs,” London, 1714, “will keep well disposed minds so intent upon the weight and seriousness [43] of the matter as not to leave them at Leisure for little Impertinences of Criticism upon the Phrase and Dress; or the exactness of Measure and Rhyme in these sacred composures.” True enough; but the poet or poetaster must not presume upon any self-imposed title of sacredness. The truly spiritual taste and the well disposed minds that after all decide what shall make up the hymn-book have no use for little impertinences of criticism; but this constant critical judgment knows, given time enough, precisely what is fitting in a hymn and what is not; and it will brook no departure from its standard. There is an Avernus for hymns, and the descent thereto is easy. The hymn-book has its standard and is very strict in upholding it. While there are notable differences of style and idea in the hymn-books of different periods, the variations from the standard are naturally much less than the variations of some other kinds of poetry from their standards.

But it is interesting to find what a motley poetry has knocked at the door of the hymnal and once in a while, under the guise of “sacred composure,” has found admittance—though not for long. Here are some lines, little better or worse than many of the translations that gained admittance for a time, from “The Bay Psalm Book”:

For thence he shall come for to judge

All men both dead and quick

I, in the Holy Ghost believe,

In church that’s Catholicke.

Good Thomas Hopkins, of “Sternhold and Hopkins,” lived in stormy, perilous times. Like St. Peter, he sometimes showed the impatience which is characteristic of the military mind.

Why dost thou draw thy hand aback,

And hide it in thy Lappe?

O pluck it out, and be not slack

To give thy foes a rappe!

In Reeve’s “Spiritual Hymns” of the latter seventeenth century, No. 107 attributes to Deity a curious and surprising argument on the unity of the church.

I am no Bigamist,

I have no Concubines;

It’s only one Church I admit,

One child; I have no twins.

Hymn 111 of the same book is addressed to the church.

Our hearts are swifter than our Charets;

We’ll both conspire from our places:

Thou here, and I from lofty Garrets,

We’ll lift this world off its Basis.

There was a song in an old American hymn-book which was neighborly and frank, but a shade too peremptory. “Come go with us,” it says,

But if you will refuse us,

We bid you all farewell;

We’re on the road to Canaan,

You on the road to hell.

The best hymns, indeed, are notable for boldness and animation of style, and always of course under artistic control. The single composition that would probably be named by more people, high and low, urbane and rustic, religious and non-religious, as the best hymn in the language, “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” may be taken as a pattern for good hymn verse. As for life and spirit, not Byron nor Shelley ever wrote more exultant lines than these:

Or, if on joyful wing,

Cleaving the sky,

Sun, moon and stars forgot,

Upwards I fly.

Many of the modern as well as medieval and ancient hymns are all but too bold. Persons of milder temperament object to some of the old favorites as being vigorous to the extent of violence. A few lines of a famous hymn of the eighteenth century, Cowper’s

There is a fountain filled with blood,

Drawn from Immanuel’s veins;

And sinners plunged beneath that flood,

Lose all their guilty stains,

are enough to show that excessive mildness is not an inherent trait of the hymn as a literary type. One can hear the stalwart poetry of medieval hymns even without knowing Latin.

Dies iræ, dies illa,

Solvet sæclum in favilla,

Teste David cum Sibylla.

Tuba mirum spargens sonum

Per sepulchra regionum,

Coget omnes ante thronum.

A well known hymn of the Old Testament, the one hundred and thirty-seventh Psalm, closes:

Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.

Whether the ancient pious sang this as fact or figure, modern taste may not at any rate tax it with lack of vigor. There is much of sweetness and gentleness in our hymnody, but there is tumultuous force in it also. There is no more reason for a hymn to be pallid and weak than for a person to be so. Within its scanty plot of ground the hymn can put forth as vivid purple and gold as grows in any field. These lines from Katherine Lee Bates’s hymn—one which bids fair to enter the company of the world’s great patriotic hymns—show that a hymn may be full of color:

Oh beautiful for spacious skies,

For amber waves of grain,

For purple mountain majesties

Above the fruited plain!

A few passages further, based on the manifestations of nature we call the weather, show here that the hymn has force and color and variety to stir the heart and give flight to the imagination:

Ye winds of night, your force combine;

Without his high behest,

Ye shall not in the mountain pine

Disturb the sparrow’s nest.

Kirke White.

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.

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.

Ye faithful saints, fresh courage take,

The clouds ye so much dread

Are big with mercy, and shall break

In blessings on your head.

The following lines are not untypical of the vivid imagery and the lyric intensity of the English hymn-book:

Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood

Stand dressed in living green.

Must I be carried to the skies

On flowery beds of ease,

While others fought to win the prize

And sailed through bloody seas?

I have seen him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,

They have builded him an altar in the evening dews and damps;

I have read his righteous sentence in the dim and flaring lamps,

His truth is marching on.

Rise, crowned with light, imperial Salem, rise;

Exalt thy towering head and lift thine eyes!

See heaven its sparkling portals wide display,

And break upon thee in a flood of day.

Our years are like the shadows

On sunny hills that lie,

Or grasses in the meadows,

That blossom but to die,

A sleep, a dream, a story,

By strangers quickly told,

An unremaining glory

Of things that soon are old.

Lord of all being, throned afar,

Thy glory flames from sun and star;

Center and soul of every sphere,

Yet to each loving heart how near.

Majestic sweetness sits enthroned

Upon the Saviour’s brow.

Lo, he comes with clouds descending.

Jerusalem, the golden,

With milk and honey blest.

How gentle God’s commands!

How kind his precepts are!

Hark! hark, my soul! angelic songs are swelling

O’er earth’s green fields, and ocean’s wave-beat shore.

There are many single lines of exquisite poetry which, because they are so familiar, fail immediately to arouse the imagination.

In the cross of Christ I glory,

Towering o’er the wrecks of time.

A startlingly magnificent lyrical summary of history is the second line.

“Rock of Ages, cleft for me,” becomes a more strangely rich verse as one regards it longer. Its six words comprise a trope of the Eastern deserts of the wildly imaginative quality of the story of “Open, Sesame”; an epithet, “Rock of Ages,” traced by scholars at least three thousand years back; and a cry of fervent piety from the heart of rural England.

Following are other lines which may be considered illustrative of the imagery and feeling of the hymn-book. Some carry a feeling of elemental sadness, some of militant high resolve, some of sanguine praise and hope:

Time like an ever-rolling stream

Bears all her sons away.

The tumult and the shouting dies;

The captains and the kings depart;

Still stands thine ancient sacrifice,

An humble and a contrite heart.

A few more years shall roll

O’er these dark hills of time.

From every stormy wind that blows,

From every swelling tide of woes,

There is a calm, a sure retreat.

As pants the hart for cooling streams

When heated in the chase.

Thou wast their rock, their fortress, and their might,

Thou, Lord, their Captain in the well-fought fight.

His are the thousand sparkling rills

That from a thousand fountains burst,

And fill with music all the hills,

And yet, he said, “I thirst.”

Rise, my soul, and stretch thy wings.

Hell’s foundations tremble

At the shout of praise.

O, beautiful for patriot’s dream

That sees beyond the years

Thine alabaster cities gleam,

Undimmed by human tears.

These scattered lines from the hymn-book indicate how this type of lyric, though it uses few and simple [51] words and the simplest form of verse, and though it may appear excessively plain, can convey large ideas and stir deep emotions. And Poetry is to the discerning mind none the less gracious when, meetly clad, she moves as a ministering spirit among all sorts and conditions of men, bearing consolation and courage and amplitude of spirit, inspiring charity and rightness of life and faith in eternal Providence.