Too often within the euphoria of singing together we do not really think very much concerning the words. That’s regrettable. It’s also regrettable that infrequently do we predict concerning the lifetime of the authors of hymns and why they wrote what they did. My latest book, A Joyful Noise, selects 24 – there might have been many more – whom I discovered interesting and who lived in interesting times – times of crisis in lots of cases, which shows in what and the way they wrote.
For, lots of the things we predict have at all times been there have in actual fact not at all times been there. For example, what number of keep in mind that the Church of England didn’t allow the singing of hymns in church until 1820? Many favourites come from before that: from the mediaeval Latin tradition, the German Lutheran tradition, and a few in fact come from the nonconformists – particularly the work of individuals like the nice Isaac Watts.
Details about a few of them put flesh on the bones of myth. Ambrose, for instance, was a civil servant in Milan, capital of the empire within the late 4th century. He wasn’t even baptised when the quarrelling parties within the church agreed that only he could hold them together. He hated the thought, but though he went into hiding, he was dragged out, literally, forcibly baptised, priested and made bishop multi function week. He proved a really great bishop indeed, who stood as much as Emperor Theodosius the Great and had the charisma to rebuke him publicly. But it’s often forgotten that when he was bishop, the pagan altars were still smoking, and there was no guarantee that Christianity would remain free from persecution.
A few centuries later I feel of Venantius Fortunatus, creator of two popular Passion hymns, wandering as a strolling minstrel across the courts of Merovingian Europe, before meeting St Radegund, who persuaded him to turn into a bishop. Then there’s the prolific Charles Wesley about whom John frightened, after they were together at Oxford. Charles told John that he was ‘very desirous of information but cannot bear the drudgery of coming at it near so well as you can. … My head will in no way keep pace with my heart’. And freed of family restraints, Charles’ first 12 months was somewhat, well, relaxed: several excursions to London and emotional entanglements with actresses. To John’s attempts to make him more serious he objected: ‘What? Would you’ve me to be a saint directly?’
I feel too of Isaac Watts, an internationally known scholar and correspondent of Benjamin Franklin, his hymns were often regarded with great disapproval as ‘Watts’ Whims’. Even as a toddler he spoke in verse. Once, explaining why his eyes were open during family prayers, he replied, ‘Just a little mouse for want of stairs, ran up a rope to say its prayers.’ Another time, when his father was about to punish him for something , he exclaimed, ‘O father, do some pity take, And I’ll no more verses make.’ The promise was not kept.
But talking of violence, what concerning the gentle, scholarly J. M. Neale, the best translator of the Latin hymns (who also gave us ‘Good King Wenceslas’)? He was so hated for his liturgical views that at a funeral in Lewes he was assaulted by a mob, fomented by some distinguished residents, and only escaped lynching since the police bundled him into the King’s Head pub. The mob soon gathered round it, and eventually, on police advice, he scrambled across gardens and over partitions to the railway station.
Two books vastly influenced the hymn tradition: Hymns Ancient and Modern (1861) and the English Hymnal (1906). For the latter – when it appeared the Archbishop of Canterbury banned it – we must thank the remarkable Percy Dearmer, eventually made Canon of Westminster despite his unconventional and socialist views. Dearmer was fed up with the standard of many hymns commonly sung, and persuaded Oxford University Press to commission a group of fine hymns with good music to boost the fantastic thing about holiness within the yearly liturgical round. A flamboyant man – an extravagance of dress, when an undergraduate, was characteristic – but something of a genius, he selected an almost complete unknown – a jobbing, atheist organist – as music editor of the brand new hymnal: Ralph Vaughan Williams.
He had style, and garments are statements. G. K. Chesterton, certainly one of Dearmer’s religious protégés, and himself not uncolourful in appearance or language, recalled how Dearmer, out and about on pastoral calls, would wear a cassock topped by a priest’s gown, and his square cap (velvet for a Doctor of his University). Chesterton tells how he and Dearmer, walking together and talking passionately as usual, once encountered some street urchins, who called out, “No Popery,” or “To hell with the Pope.”… Dearmer’s response was sternly to confront them with concise historical and ecclesiological facts, concluding, ‘Are you aware that that is the precise costume during which Latimer went to the stake?’
I’m wondering if those boys, surely astonished, were ever made curious to know their heritage. I even have tried to acknowledge a few of that heritage in my latest book.
Charles Moseley is the creator of A Joyful Noise: Some authors, their times and their hymns, available now in hardback, priced £16.99.
