Читать книгу In Tuneful Accord - Trevor Beeson - Страница 9

5. Nineteenth-Century Hymn Writers and Composers

There was little hymn singing in the Church of England before about 1820. An edition of Tate and Brady’s late seventeenth-century versification of the psalms included some to secular folk tunes but this was not sufficient to relieve the general austerity of Sunday worship. The explanation of this lack of hymnody lies in the fact that at the Reformation the Church of England was influenced by the theology of John Calvin, rather than that of Martin Luther. This was so tied to the Bible that it became possible to use only biblical material for worship purposes. Thus Bible readings, psalms, biblical canticles and prayers echoing the biblical themes formed the staple provided by the Book of Common Prayer. Anthems, when used, consisted of aspirations or affirmations drawn from the Bible. This was in marked contrast to the situation in those parts of Europe, most notably Germany, where the embracing of Lutheranism, whose handling of the Bible was less rigid, allowed the flowering of what became a great tradition of mighty hymns, including some written by Luther himself. These would eventually enrich the worship and devotion of Christians everywhere. Bach’s Passions and his Christmas Oratorio have many Arias with non-scriptural words.

The breakthrough in England was created by the Methodists who abandoned Calvinist theology and came to regard music as well as preaching as a major weapon in their campaign to evangelize the English people and to rescue the Church of England from the pit of formality and complacency into which it had descended. Hymns, in common with worship as a whole, were seen as ‘a converting ordinance’ and the sight of huge congregations, mainly of working people, united in their enthusiastic singing of them, provided clear evidence of their effectiveness. When the preface to the first edition of the 1933 Methodist Hymn Book began, as all subsequent editions have done, ‘Methodism was born in song’, this was a plain statement of the truth.

The fact that during the early years of the nineteenth century Methodist congregations, meeting in halls and the open air, were attracting increasing numbers from parish churches was an important incentive to Anglican clergy to make hymn singing an integral part of their own services. A late eighteenth-century hymn-singing Evangelical movement within the Church of England was also influential and, as the century advanced, a widespread belief arose that the church’s worship needed to be renewed and enhanced by greater congregational participation. All these factors combined to open the doors to a degree of spontaneous change that transformed the experience of worship in England’s parish churches. The rise of the Anglo-Catholic Oxford Movement later contributed a rich supply of ancient hymns drawn from medieval sources and brought alive by fine translations from the Latin.

The Methodists were prolific hymn writers and one of their number, Charles Wesley, who never left the ministry of the Church of England, held a high doctrine of the Eucharist. He combined the essential gifts of the hymn writer – deep religious insight, confirmed by personal experience and expressed through the gifts of the poet – to the level of genius and wrote no fewer than 4,000 hymns. These, together with those of Isaac Watts, another genius of Independent church allegiance, and many others, became immediately available to enterprising Anglican parsons. Initially, they were not welcome everywhere: the gentry tended to regard them as vulgar and some bishops declared hymns to be illegal inasmuch as no provision for them was made by the rubrics of the Prayer Book.

Nonetheless, once started, the use of hymns became unstoppable. By 1840 about 40 different hymn books, mainly local productions, were in use and one of these, consisting of 146 hymns, edited by a Sheffield vicar and, after a struggle, authorized by the Archbishop of York, ran to 29 editions, circulating among many parishes in the north of England.

Reginald Heber

Often described as ‘the father of the modern hymn book’, Heber was a child of the eighteenth century, born into a Yorkshire family of landed gentry, though his father was also a Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford. Reginald had a brilliant career at the same college, winning a number of poetry prizes and election to a fellowship of All Souls’ College. After two years of travelling in Europe, he was ordained in 1804 and immediately appointed Rector of Hodnet, a family living in Shropshire, which had been kept vacant for two years until his return to England. He was also squire of the parish and his father-in-law, who was Dean of St Asaph, secured for him a prebend of that cathedral. His scholarship was recognized by appointment as Bampton Lecturer at Oxford, and his income further augmented by the preachership of Lincolns Inn, in London.

In 1822 he was offered the bishopric of Calcutta, which at first he declined, but later was persuaded to accept. For the next four years he was an exemplary missionary bishop. His diocese covered the whole of British India and he travelled extensively, preaching, confirming and generally encouraging the small, scattered expatriate communities. But in 1826, after conducting a Confirmation and visiting a school, he sought to cool down in a swimming pool and died from drowning.

In the following year, Heber’s widow managed at last to obtain permission from the Archbishop of Canterbury for the publication of a hymn book compiled by her husband during his years at Hodnet. Soon after his arrival in the parish he perceived that hymns might be useful for illustrating the Bible readings in the Sunday services and at the same time involve the congregation more closely in the worship. Until then the only collection of hymns known to him was Olney Hymns – a product of the Evangelical movement in 1779 – which included items by important poets such as John Newton, William Cowper and Augustus Toplady.

Heber, although a High Churchman, wrote about his experience of using hymns in this way in an evangelical magazine, the Christian Observer, and decided that hymns were also needed to illustrate the Christian year – possibly some appropriate to every Sunday. He therefore made a collection of 98 hymns, including 57 composed by himself and another 13 by his friend H. H. Milman, a distinguished church historian who eventually became Dean of St Paul’s and is best remembered for his Palm Sunday hymn ‘Ride on, ride on, in majesty’. The remainder included the work of some of the greatest English poets, but neither the Bishop of London nor the Archbishop of Canterbury was willing to authorize the book’s use and its editor never saw it in print. Of his own hymns, it is hard to imagine any hymn book lacking ‘Holy, holy, holy’ or ‘Brightest and best of the sons of the morning’ or ‘From Greenland’s icy mountains’, though the use of this last hymn is now problematical.

A decisive factor in the overcoming of episcopal opposition was the work of a number of Oxford Movement scholars who demonstrated that hymns, far from being a recent Methodist invention, went back to some of the church’s earliest liturgies and played an important part in the worship and devotion of the medieval church.

John Mason Neale

Chief among these scholars and an adornment of the Victorian church was John Mason Neale, whose translations from Greek and Latin and own compositions contributed 72 items – one-tenth of the whole – to The English Hymnal and brought enrichment to Anglican worship everywhere.

He was born in 1818, his father, an evangelical clergyman, being also a brilliant mathematician and a Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge. John, having lost his father when he was only five, went as a scholar of Trinity College, Cambridge, and became the best Classic of his year. Following ordination, he stayed on as chaplain and assistant tutor of Downing College and won many prizes for poetry. He also came under the influence of a High Church movement, parallel to the developing Oxford Movement, and in 1839, in company with two undergraduates, founded the Cambridge Camden Society (later renamed the Ecclesiological Society), to be concerned with Tractarian worship. In 1841 a periodical, The Ecclesiologist, began publication in order to demonstrate the implications of the new movement for church architecture. For better or (almost certainly) worse this had immense influence, leading among other things to the placing of choirs in chancels. The aim was to restore the ceremonial and vesture of medieval times, together with early Gregorian chant and Renaissance polyphony.

In 1842 Neale began work as a curate in Guildford (then in Winchester Diocese) but Bishop Charles Sumner, an evangelical, refused to license him because of his high church views, and it was left to the Bishop of Chichester to present him to the small living of Crawley in Sussex. Ill health, however, precluded his taking this up and during the next three years he divided his time between Penzance and Madeira. On his return to Sussex in 1846 he became Warden of Sackville College, East Grinstead – a charity home for 30 people. The buildings were badly dilapidated and he took the opportunity to rebuild the chapel, furnishing it according to Camden Society principle. The bishop denounced this as ‘frippery’ and ‘spiritual haberdashery’, but, since the chapel was outside his jurisdiction, he could do no more than inhibit Neale from ministering in the diocese. This inhibition remained in force for the next 16 years until Bishop Samuel Wilberforce persuaded his episcopal colleague to revoke it. Thereafter bishop and warden got on rather well.

In any case, Neale had many other interests to occupy his time. He founded a religious order for women, the Society of St Margaret, which began as a nursing order but quickly extended to include an orphanage, a girls’ boarding school and a home ‘for the reformation of fallen women’. Its work continues in a modified form today, with outposts in London, Sri Lanka and Boston, USA. With a wife and five children to support, his income of £30 p.a. needed considerable augmentation and from 1851–53 he employed his literary skill and encyclopaedic knowledge in the writing of three leading articles a week for the Morning Chronicle. He spoke 20 languages and an extraordinary number of books came from his pen on church history, liturgy, patristics, the Eastern Church, and children’s interests.

But his chief life’s work – he died when only 48 – was the recovery and translation of hymns from the past for which his scholarship, linguistic skill and poetic gift perfectly equipped him. A steady stream of work, including hymns of his own composition, became available – hymns chiefly medieval on the Joys and Glories of Paradise (1865), Hymns for Use during the Cattle Plague (1866), The Invalid’s Hymn Book (1866) and, most notably, Hymns Noted, which appeared in two parts in 1851 and 1854 and was a joint enterprise for which Neale translated 94 items from Greek and medieval Latin, while Thomas Helmore adapted their original Sarum plainsong melodies. One-eighth of the contents of the first edition of Hymns Ancient and Modern were provided by Neale, from either translations or his own writing, and he edited two volumes of carols for Christmas (1853) and Eastertide (1854). Hymns of the Eastern Church appeared in 1862.

Among the best known of Neale’s hymns (from translation) are ‘Ye Choirs of new Jerusalem’, ‘The Day of Resurrection’, ‘Christ is made the sure Foundation’, ‘All glory, laud and honour’, and ‘O what their joy and their glory must be’; while among his own work ‘O happy band of pilgrims’ remains the most widely used.

H. F. Lyte

It would be a foolhardy editor who left out H. F. Lyte’s ‘Abide with me’ from a new hymn book in any part of the English-speaking world. Although written nearly 200 years ago in a pre-modern world, it retains its power to cross every sort of social and cultural frontier and if not at the top of the favourite hymn charts, which it usually is, it is never far below.

In 1927 the organizers of the FA Cup Final decided, with the strong approval of King George V, that ‘Abide with me’ would provide a fitting climax to the community singing that preceded the kick-off. This decision was, obviously, not based on any theological ground but informed by an awareness that this particular hymn had in a unique way entered deeply into the emotional, if not the overtly religious, consciousness of the nation.

This was probably caused by the comforting reassurance offered by its words, and these were perfectly complemented and reinforced by William Henry Monk’s tune ‘Eventide’. Long before the 1927 Cup Final, ‘Abide with me’ had been sung at countless bedsides of the dying and at even more funerals. And in a world frequently devastated by war it was the one hymn known and valued by those serving at the front line or on a sinking ship, or held in a prisoner-of-war camp. The heroine nurse Edith Cavell and an army chaplain sang ‘Abide with me’ together in her cell before she was shot by the Germans in 1915.

The words were inspired by Luke 24.29, where during the evening of the first Easter Day the disciples, accompanied by the incognito Jesus on a journey to Emmaus, invited him to spend the night in their home: ‘Abide with us; for it is toward evening and the day is far spent.’ Its author was only 27 when as a young curate he heard a dying friend repeat the phrase ‘Abide with me’. This led him to compose some verses on this theme which he kept to himself until shortly before his own death in 1847 when he gave the manuscript to a relative who got them published soon afterwards. The original version had three additional verses, 3–5, which were subsequently omitted from most hymn books, not because there was anything amiss with them but, presumably, because they lifted the emphasis from the deathbed to continuing daily life.

Lyte, the son of a naval captain, was born in Scotland in 1793 but soon moved with his family to Ireland. At Trinity College, Dublin, he won poetry prizes in three successive years. He intended to become a doctor, but changed his mind and, following ordination, became curate of a parish near Wexford. Ill-health caused him to resign and he lived for a time in the more hospitable climate of Marazion in Cornwall, where he married the heiress of a rich Irish clergyman.

On recovery of his health he became a curate at Lymington in Hampshire, then at Charlton in Devon, before becoming vicar of the new parish of Lower Brixham, also in Devon, where he remained for 25 years. He was, however, frequently beset by ill-health, requiring many foreign tours, and only two months after his resignation from Brixham he died of tuberculosis in Nice. Aided doubtless by the wealth of his wife, he accumulated a considerable library of theology and Old English poetry which occupied a London auction house for 17 days in the year following his death.

Lyte wrote some secular music – ‘On a naval officer’ was set to music by Arthur Sullivan – but most of his work, including some hymns, was first published in Poems Chiefly Religious (1833). The Spirit of the Psalms (1834) provided metrical versions of the psalms for use every Sunday of the year and one of these, ‘Praise, my soul, the King of Heaven’ (Psalm 103), is now hardly less dispensable than ‘Abide with me’. Two others, ‘Pleasant are thy courts above’ (Psalm 84) and ‘God of mercy, God of grace’ (Palms 67), remain popular and indicate that Lyte was not always in a funereal mood.

J. B. Dykes

John Bacchus Dykes, the most prolific, as well as the most heavily criticized, of the Oxford Movement’s hymn composers, was Precentor of Durham Cathedral from 1849 to 1862. When he resigned this office in order to become, on the nomination of the dean and chapter, vicar of the ancient parish of St Oswald he retained his minor canonry until the end of his relatively short life in 1876. The Durham choir was better than most, though its ceremonial was slack.

The bishop at the time was Charles Baring, a wealthy scion of the banking family and a notable church builder, who set himself the formidable task of repairing the Church of England’s scandalous neglect of the rapidly developing North East. In this he was very successful, but, more than any of his episcopal colleagues, he was intolerant of clergy who had been influenced by the Oxford Movement. So, although St Oswald’s embraced most of the city, Baring steadfastly refused to licence any curates to Dykes. Thus, in the context of a bitter conflict with his bishop, which included an unsuccessful appeal to the courts, Dykes struggled to minister to his parish single-handed for 12 years. In the end he was driven to resignation by a serious physical and psychological breakdown.

Most of his 300 hymns were composed before his pastoral responsibilities had become so demanding. Having heard by chance of the plans for what became Hymns Ancient and Modern, he sent some of his tunes to Dr W. H. Monk the music editor and had seven of them accepted for the first edition (1861). Another 24 were taken into the 1868 supplement and the edition published in 1875 included 56 of his items. His special usefulness to the editor lay in his ability to compose tunes to suit particular words, often on request. But, while this had some advantages, it meant that the music was too closely tied to inferior hymns of cloying sentimentality, narrow subjectivity or gloomy fatalism. One of the specialisms was a hymn with a short final line which he continued to drag out excruciatingly. The overall effect of many of his tunes was to reduce the atmosphere of worship.

Ralph Vaughan Williams was ruthless in his treatment of Dykes when given responsibility for the music of The English Hymnal (1906). He accepted only six of his tunes into the main book and was driven, only by their popularity, to place another five into an appendix which he called his ‘chamber of horrors’. As late as its 1950 revision, however, Hymns Ancient and Modern retained as many as 30 of his tunes and Erik Routley, probably the severest critic of Victorian hymnody, surprisingly described 20 of these as ‘indispensable to congregations’. Others might restrict this accolade to his generally acknowledged fine tunes to John Henry Newman’s great hymns ‘Lead kindly light’ and ‘Praise to the holiest in the height’ and to the ever popular ‘Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty’, ‘Eternal Father strong to save’ and ‘The King of Love my shepherd is’ (which Vaughan Williams regretted that copyright restrictions prevented him from using in The English Hymnal).

John Bacchus Dykes was born in Hull in 1823. His grandfather, an enterprising church builder in the town, was Vicar of St John’s Hull, and young John learned from the age of ten to play the organ in his church. While at St Catherine’s College, Cambridge, he founded the university Musical Society and was a popular performer of comic songs. He also came under the influence of the Oxford Movement, abandoning his family’s Evangelical tradition and, having sought Holy Orders, became curate of Malton, near York, in 1847. Two years later he went to Durham Cathedral, but he always said that, even though he had a great love of music, the work of a priest was more important to him. Durham University honoured him with a doctorate of music.

Hymns Ancient and Modern

In his valuable Abide with Me: The World of Victorian Hymns (1997), Ian Bradley quotes from an article by Bertram Barnaby in the Guardian (9 April 1977) in which he estimates that between 1873 and 1901 around 400,000 hymns were written. How many of these were Anglican is impossible to tell, but the contributions of Heber, Neale, Lyte and Dykes were substantially augmented by Mrs C. F. Alexander, Sabine Baring-Gould, John Ellerton, F. W. Faber, William Walsham How and John Keble (from his Christian Year poems). A multitude of others, mainly clergymen, added hymns of varying quality, not all of which have remained in use and some of which only briefly saw the light of day.

By the 1850s it was apparent that the plethora of collections of hymns then circulating needed to be replaced by a single volume in which the dross had been eliminated and hymns of quality provided for the entire Christian year – this last requirement indicating the growing influence of the Oxford Movement. In 1858 two London parish clergymen, William Denton and Francis Murray, both hymn-book compilers, decided while travelling together on the Great Western Railway that the time was right for such a volume. A meeting was convened at St Barnabas, Pimlico, in London, a committee of High Church parish priests formed and over the next two years a huge number of hymns were scrutinized, of which 273 were chosen. Nearly 50 per cent of these were translations from ancient Greek and Latin sources, just over one-third were nineteenth-century creations, and the remainder originated in pre-nineteenth-century England or Germany. Hence the inspired title Hymns Ancient and Modern (1861), which quickly established itself as an essential ingredient of Anglican worship not only in Britain but throughout the English-speaking world.

No less inspired was the choice of editors. The Revd Sir Henry Williams Baker, Bart., who was entrusted with the words, was for 27 years Vicar of Monkland, near Leominster, and himself a notable hymn writer responsible for ‘The King of Love my Shepherd is’ (Psalm 23), ‘Lord, Thy Word abideth’ and ‘O praise ye the Lord’. William Henry Monk, organist of St Matthias Church, Stoke Newington, and Professor of Vocal Music at King’s College, London, applied the skills employed in the creation of a tune for ‘Abide with me’ to the choice of singable tunes for the other 272. His choices – which involved the commissioning of new tunes where none was already available – were probably more critical than those of the words editor in determining whether or not particular hymns would become popular. It is the measure of his success that so many of the tunes originally attached to the hymns have remained in use for 150 years and in many instances are now inseparable from them.

The immediate popularity of the book led to the production of a 113-hymn supplement (more than half being published for the first time) in 1868, and further supplements were added in 1889 and 1916. But this led to an overall decline in quality and drastic revisions were needed. This process has continued and the Proprietors (now the Council) of Hymns Ancient and Modern have remained an independent profit-making enterprise.

It is not easy now to appreciate the extent to which hymn singing entered into the culture of Victorian England. Starting as a novelty, it spread like wildfire not only to the churches but also to schools, public houses and wherever people gathered socially – more significantly to private houses where families and friends gathered round a piano or some other instrument to sing what soon became regarded as ‘old favourites’. Ian Bradley, both an authority on and a stout defender of the Victorian hymn, has described hymns as the folk music of the Victorian age and even gone as far as likening them, perhaps with less justification, to modern soap operas.

They still stand in need of their defenders since, from the time of The English Hymnal (1906) onwards, they have been subjected to the severest of criticism from professional church musicians – subjectivity, emotionalism, banal verse and unbelievably bad music being the chief charges. That this is true of a significant proportion of the huge output can hardly be denied, but more recently there has been a growing recognition that among the Victorian material that has nurtured the devotional life of several generations of Christian believers, there is pure gold. In any event, churchgoers continue to love the best of them and complain strongly whenever they are neglected.