IV. ANALYSIS OF CHANGES MADE
It may be instructive to study more in detail the occasions for changes made in our hymns and learn the justification for many of them. If some of them seem somewhat microscopic and even captious, none the less they make for exactness, for nice discrimination, and for more intelligent appreciation of the literary and spiritual values of our magnificent body of hymns.[2]
The Omission of Verses.
A very important change from the original of many hymns is the omission of some of the less valuable stanzas, or even a condensation of some of them by omitting unattractive lines.
“Oh for a thousand tongues to sing,” the fine hymn that opens all but recent Methodist hymnals, originally began, “Glory to God and praise and love,” and had eighteen stanzas. The hymn as now used consists of stanzas 7 to 12 of the original. Some hymnals omit stanza 10.
In the Trinity hymn sometimes ascribed to Charles Wesley, “Come, Thou Almighty King,” the second of the original five stanzas is always omitted:
“Jesus, our Lord, arise,
Scatter our enemies,
And make them fall;
Let thine almighty aid
Our sure defense be made,
Our souls on thee be stayed;
Lord, hear our call.”
The evident imitation of the second stanza of the British National anthem is too obvious:
“O Lord, our God, arise,
Scatter his enemies,
And make them fall.
Frustrate their knavish tricks,
Confound their politics,
On Him our hearts we fix;
God save the King.”
In Bishop Brooks’ original of “O little town of Bethlehem,” so widely known and used, the fourth stanza is omitted:
“Where children, pure and happy,
Pray to the Blessed Child;
Where misery cries out to thee,
Son of the Mother mild;
Where charity stands watching,
And faith holds wide the door,
The dark night wakes, the glory breaks,
And Christmas comes once more.”
The reasons are not far to seek: the double rhyme in the third line is so forced as to be awkward; the first two lines refer to Jesus in the third person, but the next two in the second; more important still, the stanza does not make a sufficient addition to the value of the hymn to warrant the added length.
The stanza,
“Thy body slain, sweet Jesus, thine,
And bathed in its own blood,
While all exposed to wrath divine,
The glorious suff’rer stood,”
if retained, despite its medieval picture of our suffering Lord, would have added nothing to Watts’ noble hymn, “Alas! and did my Saviour bleed,” but rather would have hemmed the progress of its thought and feeling.
Few of the lovers of Robinson’s classic hymn, “Come, Thou Fount of every blessing,” would have enjoyed singing and visualizing the omitted fourth stanza,
“O that day when freed from sinning,
I shall see thy lovely face!
Richly clothed in blood-washed linen,
How I’ll sing thy sovereign grace!”
A stanza was omitted from a hymn by Isaac Watts by Dr. Worcester, and he was compelled by public sentiment to replace it in his next collection. Who was right—Dr. Worcester, or Watts and the church public?
“But while I bled and groaned and died,
I ruined Satan’s Throne;
High on my cross I hung and spy’d
The monster tumbling down.”
What a travesty in this stanza of Christ’s words, “I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven”!
The omission of all the older hymns regarding “the state of the unpenitent dead” in our more recent hymnals is due to their usually rather lurid expressions, going beyond those of the Scriptures, to the reaction in the church at large against the rather mechanical and heartless emphasis of the painful doctrine—not only in hymns, but in sermons as well—and also to the realization that it is not a theme fitted for singing.
What modern congregation could sing Watts’ stanza formulating the doctrine,
“Up to the courts where angels dwell,
It [the soul] mounts triumphant there;
Or devils plunge it down to hell
In infinite despair”?
When we come to the hymns constructed by selecting stanzas from long poems—e.g., by John Keble or by John Greenleaf Whittier—we reach marvels of skill in selection and co-ordination that have greatly enriched English hymnody.
Reconstructing and Rewriting Faulty Hymns.
John Wesley inveighed against “hymn-cobblers,” but he was a most efficient and skillful “hymn-cobbler” himself. He deserves high commendation for his literary skill and taste in cutting the rough diamonds that passed through his editorial hands. A few instances will illustrate his success.
“Before Jehovah’s awful throne” is recognized as one of Watts’ noblest hymns of worship. But it is Wesley’s reconstruction that brought out its essential nobility.
Watts began it in rather mechanical fashion,
“Sing to the Lord with joyful voice,
Let every land his name adore;
The British Isles shall send the noise
Across the ocean to the shore.”
Wesley omitted this stanza entirely. Beginning with the second stanza,
“With gladness bow before his throne,
And let his presence raise your joys;
Know that the Lord is God alone
And formed our soul and framed our voice”
(which shows that Watts’ inspiration had begun to rise), Wesley transformed it into a majestic expression of pure worship:
“Before Jehovah’s awful throne,
Ye nations, bow with sacred joy;
Know that the Lord is God alone,
He can create and he destroy.”
He was equally successful with Watts’ third stanza:
“Infinite power, without our aid,
Figured our clay to human mould;
And when our wandering feet had strayed,
He brought us to his sacred fold.”
The first line is faulty: the accent of “infinite” is on the first syllable: Watts placed it on the second. The second line conveys no clear idea: how is clay “figured”? The third and fourth lines are bald and ordinary, lacking in poetic grace. See how deftly Wesley took Watts’ material and gave it grace and dignity:
“His sovereign power, without our aid,
Made us of clay and formed us men;
And when like wand’ring sheep we strayed,
He brought us to his fold again.”
Transforming Watts’ fourth stanza in like manner, he added a majestic fifth stanza of his own:
“Wide as the world is thy command,
Vast as eternity thy love;
Firm as a rock thy truth shall stand
When rolling years shall cease to move,”
completing one of the noblest hymns in the language.
Another hymn of Isaac Watts was enriched by passing through the hands of John Wesley. Besides correcting minor infelicities and curtailing its impracticable length, he rewrote the third stanza of the very popular hymn, “Come, ye that love the Lord,” transforming Watts’
“The God that rules on high
And thunders when he please,
That rides upon the stormy sky
And manages the seas,”
into
“The God that rules on high,
That all the earth surveys,
That rides upon the stormy sky
And calms the roaring seas.”
He might have gone further and obviated the break of the sentence occurring between the third and fourth stanzas. Some hymnal editors meet the difficulty by omitting both.
Rev. Martin Madan wrote no hymns; his only claim to immortality rests on his emendations of the hymns of greater men. But he well deserves to be remembered for some of his happy improvements of important hymns. His revision of Watts’ hymn “He dies! the Heavenly Lover dies!” has already been referred to.
Madan very fortunately changed Charles Wesley’s
“Hark how all the welkin rings,
Glory to the King of Kings,”
into the much more poetical lines:
“Hark! the herald angels sing,
‘Glory to the newborn King.’”
Minor Felicitous Changes.
No small improvement in our hymns consists of the change of individual phrases because of misplaced accents, unfortunate consonantal combinations, inept metaphors, and phrases that are secular in spirit and associations.
In Cowper’s “Jesus, where’er thy people meet,” the second line had the word “inhabitest,” difficult to sing; it was changed to “Dost dwell with those.”
In Bishop Ken’s “Evening Hymn” some bad cases of wrong accents have been corrected. “Under thy own almighty wings” now is “Beneath the shadow of thy wings,” and “Triumphing rise at the last day” is become “Rise glorious at the judgment day.”
Isaac Watts’ theory that hymns should eschew poetic grace was carried too far—into euphonic slovenliness. In “Welcome, sweet day of rest” he wrote “One day amidst the place,” ignoring the fact that “amidst” is not singable. “One day in such a place” is much more suave. In “Joy to the world! The Lord is come!” he wrote in the first line of stanza three “let sins and sorrows grow”; the excessive sibilation has been removed by using singular nouns.
In Charles Wesley’s very useful hymn, “Ye servants of God, your Master proclaim,” “The praises of Jesus” is substituted for “Our Jesus’ praises,” distributing the hissing s’s more musically. The second and third stanzas are wisely omitted; few congregations could sing, with the solemnity the rest of the hymn calls for, such lines as
“When devils engage, the billows arise,
And horribly rage and threaten the skies.”
Charles Wesley in his hymn, “Jesus, let thy pitying eye,” had a very realistic vision of the crucifixion and wrote “My Saviour gasped, ‘Forgive!’” which for singing purposes was well emended to “prayed.” How did it escape the eagle eye of his brother John? Or did the influence of the Moravians, who were fond of these physical touches in writing of the crucifixion, affect both the Wesleys?
The “Protestant Te Deum,” “All hail the power of Jesus’ name,” has fared well—or ill, according to the point of view—at the hands of “hymn-tinkers.” Revisers have omitted
“Let highborn seraphs tune the lyre
And, as they tune it, fall
Before His face who tunes their choir,
And crown him Lord of all.”
They have transformed the stanza,
“Let every tribe and every tongue
That bound creation’s call
Now shout in universal song
The crowned Lord of all,”
into the nobler stanza,
“Let every kindred, every tribe
On this terrestrial ball,
To him all majesty ascribe,
And crown him Lord of all.”
Omitting one or two more stanzas, Dr. John Rippon has added a last stanza that puts a fitting climax to the whole hymn:
“Oh, that, with yonder sacred throng,
We at his feet may fall!
We’ll join the everlasting song,
And crown him Lord of all.”
Edward Mote began his widely-used hymn, “My hope is built on nothing less,” with a “stumble on the threshold,” writing “Nor earth nor hell my soul shall move,” a very unintelligent plunging in medias res. Was it Bradbury, who wrote the popular and effective tune that gave the hymn wings, that had the happy impulse to combine parts of the first and second stanzas, using the first two lines of the second stanza and the last two of the first? This gave an arresting first line and eliminated a line impossible to put on the lips of a general congregation, “Midst all the hell I feel within.”
The very familiar and useful hymn of George Heath, “My soul, be on thy guard,” is a notable example of the value of a competent editor’s emendations. In stanza three Heath wrote,
“Ne’er think the vict’ry won,
Nor once at ease sit down;
Thy arduous work will not be done
Till thou hast got thy crown.”
Again in the fourth stanza he wrote,
“Fight on, my soul, till death.
God will thy work applaud,
Reveal his love at thy last breath,
And take to his abode.”
The improvement in both stanzas, as found in our hymnals, is obvious at a glance.
Even so finished a poet as the distinguished historian Milman disfigured his noble Palm Sunday hymn, “Ride on, ride on in majesty,” by such a line as “Thine humble beast pursues its road,” which Murray changed to the graceful and appealing line, “Saviour meek, pursue thy road.”
Space is wanting to exhaust the various changes in hymns that are amply justified if their most effective use is to be secured. It is sufficient to say that changes of text must increase the perspicuity, precision, propriety, and force of the hymn. Single phrases may wisely be modified if a change corrects a wrong accent, makes a line more euphonious, adds to its vividness, expressiveness, or vigor, increases its dignity, clarifies the sense, or better adapts it to public use.
Chapter V
THE CONTENT OF THE HYMN
The hymn is not an independent entity, sufficient unto itself, whose whole purpose is to be beautiful and to give pleasure to those responsive to its charm. The hymn has a definite message, is big with purpose.
It is related to its writer in satisfying the urge for expression of ideas that will give him power over the thoughts and feelings of others, or of emotions that demand to be voiced forth in the mystic expressiveness of rhythm and rhyme.
It is related to God as the original source of its impulse and as the recipient of its response in love and praise.
It is related to the church in the aid it affords to its collective life and to the reader or singer whose spirituality is to be inspired, developed, and expressed.
It is the content expressing these several relations and purposes that separates the hymn from purely literary ideals and criticisms.