IV. THE LITERARY QUALITY NOT TO BE OVERESTIMATED

Literary Quality Not the Supreme Consideration.

Although poetical feeling and imagination and nice literary craftsmanship are not to be undervalued, but rather to be earnestly sought for in our hymns, after all, they are not the supreme considerations. Practical use has proved many hymns that conspicuously lacked them to have been supremely useful because of their spiritual content, sincerely and lucidly expressed. When hymn writers like Watts and Newton have deliberately ignored and even avoided literary values, and yet have written among the most useful hymns in our collections, the critic who insists on poetical quality has by no means a prima facie case. Charles Wesley was a poet, but in his valuable hymn “A charge to keep I have” he is a pedagogue without poetic afflatus. Standards of literary value, when not artificial, as in Samuel Johnson’s case, have their place, but a place that is modest and not supreme.

Literary Quality Should Be Subconscious.

The danger in unduly emphasizing the literary aspect of hymns is well expressed by Dr. Louis F. Benson: “The hazard is implicit in the very motive of hymn singing; the heightening of religious emotion. The danger is of mistaking sugary sentiment for true feeling and its rhetorical expression in ‘soft, luxurious flow’ for true poetry.” In other words, the conscious seeking of the hymn writer after literary atmosphere and skill of treatment is fatal to genuineness of feeling, and to his success in producing a true hymn.

It will do no harm to iterate here that the two essentials to a successful hymn are spirituality and the power to express it so as to reach the understanding as well as the hearts of the people who are to sing. According to Paul, the first commandment in hymn writing and singing is: “I will sing with the spirit”; the second is like unto it: “I will sing with the understanding also.”