Watts’ lines were published nine years before Gray was born!
Comparing the two great hymn-writers, Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley, an adequate sense may be arrived at, if the very important distinctions are noticed between the work proposed in the verses of the two admirable men. It is our conviction that while Watts has, in the stricter term of the word poet, included in himself Charles Wesley, the purpose of Wesley’s verse was especially to describe frames, feelings, and experiences, to set these to a sweet strain of popular melody, such as might rouse the thousands for whom they were intended. Nothing is more remarkable than the contrasted sense Watts and the Wesleys entertained of their performances. The preface published to the Wesleyan Hymn Book, in 1779, is one of the most extravagant efforts of conceit in our language; it is somewhat wonderful that the good taste of the Wesleyan Conference does not omit it from the editions now in the course of circulation. “Here,” it says, “is no doggerel, no botches, nothing put in to patch up the rhyme, no feeble expletives; here is nothing tinged or bombast, or low and creeping; here are no cant expressions, no words without meaning; those who impute this to us know not what they say.” “Here are,” it continues, “the purity, elegance, and strength of the English language, and the utmost simplicity and plainness suited to every capacity.” It goes on to assert that “in the following hymns is to be found the true spirit of poetry, such as cannot be acquired by art or labour, but must be the gift of nature. By labour a man may become a tolerable imitation of Spenser, Shakespeare, or Milton, and may heap together pretty compound epithets, such as pale-eyed, meek-eyed, and the like; but unless he be born a poet he will never attain to the genuine spirit of poetry.” How remarkably all this is in contrast to the spirit of the writer whose hymns had been before the world nearly half a century before this first collected edition of the Wesleys’ hymns was published. John Wesley included many of Watts’ hymns in his own hymn book, but their authorship was not acknowledged; and many others were vigorous translations from the German of Zinzendorf, Paul Gerhardt, etc.; Watts’ hymn book was entirely and wholly his own.
It is ungracious work to bring into the rivalry of comparison or contrast two singers who have so sacredly served the Church. Yet we will dare to say it here, in the hymns of Watts there is that peculiar accent, that note of pain, that majesty and melody of the deep minor chord—that sounding of a deeper experience—that ineffable something which testifies to a capacity of agony, as well as to the assurance of ecstasy which is the true poet’s prerogative and power. We would even say the very test of Watts’ genius and experience is that many of his pieces, and some of his very highest, are unfitted for more than the select experience. Wesley’s are more easy, common-place, and popular. The hymns of Watts, however, will stand a far higher test than that of the suffrages of large congregations or ecclesiastical communities—the sighs of the sick-room, the death-bed, the bereaved chamber, the private closet of heart devotion. With these verses on their lips refreshing their hearts, how many pilgrims have approached the
Land of pure delight
Where saints immortal reign.
Most of what has gone before applies to the hymns; but some especial reference should be made to the version of the Psalms. Palmer, in his “Life of Watts,” says, “This is generally allowed to be his capital production in poetry, with which, in point of utility, none of his other pieces will bear comparison.” From this verdict there will be many dissentients. It is certainly true that in some of the pieces he rises to the highest rendering of the evangelical sense of the Psalter. His object was to interpret the Psalms of Christ; it is not therefore very remarkable that when a young minister inquired of an elder which was the best commentary on the Psalms, he replied, “Watts’ version of them.” This judgment was not so singular as it seems.
Watts’ may be called the Messianic version of the Psalms; he felt that without this construction they must be very greatly inexplicable. The unfolding this idea popularly was an immense boon to the churches. We are to remember that the Book of Psalms was the great Hebrew Psalter; it was the Book of Common Prayer and Praise, and when the Christian Church arose, it still continued the use of these divine airs for the expression of its experiences and its faith. Jerome says: “The labourer, while he holds the handle of the plough, sings Alleluia, the tired reaper employs himself on the Psalms, and the vine-dresser, while lopping the vines with his curved hook, sings something out of David; these are our ballads in this part of the world; these, to use the common expression, are our love songs.” Chrysostom has a noble panegyric upon the use of the Psalms in the service of the Church. “If we keep vigil in the Church, David comes first, last, and midst. If early in the morning, David is first, last, and midst.” Again, he goes on to declare how, “in the funeral solemnities for the dead, or when the girl sits at home spinning, and not in cities alone, and not alone in churches, but in the forum and in the wilderness, and even in the uninhabitable desert, David excites to the praises of God.” And this has continued true ever since.
The case being so, why was it that, alike in Hebrew and in Christian days, the Book of Psalms has had such a sovereign power over holy souls? The personality of David has even obscured the higher personality and the Messianic symmetry; it is forgotten that in the Hebrew language David signifies the beloved, the darling, the chosen one, and that many of the Psalms, regarded as personal to him, are rather to be apprehended in the same manner in which his name occurs in Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel, in which we have “the key of David,” “David, a leader and commander to the people,” in “the sure mercies of David,” terms the fulness of which is lost sight of by their being associated with the Hebrew prince, rather than with Him who is the infinitely beloved of God and man. Thus in numerous Psalms to which the prefix is given, “A Psalm of, or by, David,” a stricter reading would be, “A Psalm to, or for, David;” in some instances this sense comes out with great force, and thus they illustrate that text in Ezekiel, penned hundreds of years after David’s death, “I will set one shepherd over them, and he shall feed them, even my servant David (i.e. the Beloved). He shall feed them and be their shepherd.” What a different fulness of meaning is given to such innumerable passages as those in the 123rd Psalm, “For thy servant David’s sake turn not away the face of thine anointed;” “The Lord hath sworn unto David, Of the fruit of thy body will I set upon thy throne:” if we substitute the Beloved one for David in many such passages, and what a rich meaning is unfolded! David was perhaps the author of all these; but in that wonderful spirit of the Hebrew playing upon words, just as he rose from his own occupation to exclaim, “The Lord is my shepherd,” so he rose from his own name, transforming it into a Divine synonym, searching for its origin and filling it out with divine and elevated ideas.[24] This was the spirit in which Watts in his version restored the Psalms to Christ, and removed them from the lower and more contracted circle of human personality to the suffering and reigning Messiah. Most readers were thankful for the noble restoration of the evangelical regalia to their rightful owner; and only here and there one or two, like the indecent and insolent Bradbury, took exception to the performance as “robbing them of their book of Praise,” as that rash and vehement man, referring to the version of Watts, said, “David is no longer suffered to be our Psalmist.”
This, then, is the spirit in which Watts translated the Psalms, to the Christian sense preserving, as we have said, the Messianic idea throughout, as in that stirring call to Christian service:
Arise, O King of Grace, arise