The later criticism of the hymn by Matthew Arnold represents more fully the attitude of the literary critic in our own day. The practical aspects of life were not ignored by him, but they did not bulk large in his mind. Hence it is not surprising that, while he fully comprehended the wide influence of the hymn, he had little or no sympathy with its spirit and even less with its purpose, so that he could write about it after this fashion: “Hymns, such as I know them, are a sort of composition which I do not at all admire.... I regret their prevalence and popularity among us.” Could anti-religious rationalism go further?
Among more recent critics, Edmund Clarence Stedman speaks of the hymn as “the kind of verse which is, of all, the most common and indispensable.” But Professor Boynton in the Cambridge History of American Literature, gives as much space to “Yankee Doodle” as he does to American Hymnody and refers to its “sentimental ornateness,” “tawdry sentimentalism,” and “banalities of evangelistic song,” unconsciously drawing an unhappy portrait of his own spiritual condition.[4]
The older criticism of the hymn had at least the merit of thoughtfulness and serious consideration of its value and of its shortcomings.
The hymns that would have satisfied literary critics would have required a spiritual delicacy and refinement, an elegance and artistry of phrase, a vagueness of religious idea devoid of genuine feeling, that would shut them out from use in the workaday world in which we live. To set aside the “good and useful purpose” acknowledged by Matthew Arnold in the consideration of the hymn is to ignore its whole reason for being, and, what is vastly more important, to ignore the deepest needs of the human soul.
III. THE WRITING OF HYMNS
The Handicap of Thought and Diction.
Alfred Tennyson clearly recognized the limitations that handicap the writer of hymns. “A good hymn is the most difficult thing in the world to write!” The hymn he did write, “Sunset and Evening Star,” beautiful as it is, failed in practicability for congregational use. Its unfitness for mass singing in its various phases is the chief stumblingblock.
The hymn writer finds in the limitations, which he must bear in mind as he writes, no small hindrance to spontaneity and poetic vision. He must limit the thought not only to the comprehension, but to the natural feelings of the people who are to sing what he writes. He must not use unusual or polysyllabic words. Striking figures, startling tropes, involved similes, obscure metaphors, allusions to things known by but few, descriptive or dramatic lines, are all forbidden. Every verse, whether in single or double meter, must be complete in itself, whatever its relation in thought to what precedes or follows. There must be unity, simplicity, condensation of thought, and yet a clearness that shuts out involved thought or mysticism that cannot be instantly grasped. The hymn writer is like a violinist called upon to play on a single string.[5]
Thomas Hornblower Gill, an English hymn writer who is slowly gaining recognition in current hymnals—The Revised Presbyterian Hymnal has five of his hymns—gives his conception of what hymns should be, in his preface to his first volume, issued in 1868. He insists that the true hymn is a true poem in every case, while it is debarred from liberties of luxuriance which may be claimed by other poetry. “It may easily be too figurative; it cannot be too glowing or imaginative... They should exhibit all the qualities of a good song—liveliness and intensity of feeling, directness, clearness and vividness of utterance, strength, sweetness, and simplicity and melody of rhythm: excessive subtlety and excessive ornament should be alike avoided.”