It was in 1736 that the Breviary Commission finished their labors and the archbishop gave to the diocese the new Breviary, which was adopted by more than fifty French dioceses. Its general character does not concern us here. It is with its hymns alone we have to do. About seventy of the primitive and mediaeval hymns still held their place in the Breviary of 1680, nearly half of them the work of Ambrose and his school. The revisers spared very few of these. Only twenty-one hymns of the earlier period were left, while eighty-five of Jean Santeul’s, nearly a hundred by Coffin himself—including some recasts of old hymns—and ninety-seven by other authors, chiefly Frenchmen of later date, were inserted. There were eleven by Guillaume de la Brunetière, a friend of Bossuet’s; six each by Claude Santeul, Nicolas le Tourneux, and Sebastian Besnault, a priest of Sens; five by Isaac Habert, Bishop of Vabres; four by the Jesuit Jean Commire; two each by the Jesuit Francis Guyet and Simon Gourdan of the Abbey of St. Victor; one each by Marc Antoine Muretus, Denis Petau, and Guillaume du Plessis de Geste; one (or three) by M. Combault, a young friend of Charles Coffin’s. This was modernism with a vengeance! New hymns were nearly thirteen to one in proportion to those from the great storehouse of the ages before the Reformation. It is not wonderful that so extreme a policy called forth a reaction as soon as the Romanticist movement, with its juster appreciation of the Middle Ages, had reached France. But by the end of the eighteenth century the old Latin hymns were banished practically from France.
As compared with Jean Santeul, Charles Coffin displays much less poetic audacity than his predecessor. You do not feel that poetry filled the same place in his intellectual existence, or that he was under the same necessity to write it. He has less genius, but a great talent for verse. And—what the critics of that age valued the most—he was more correct in his handling of the vocabulary and the metre of Latin versification. Santeul found classic Latin, much as he admired it, something of a fetter to the free movement of his genius. It was a dead language he was trying to put intense life into—an old bottle for his new wine—and at times the bottle burst. Just because Charles Coffin’s wine is not so new, his inspiration not so fresh, the bottle holds out better. And then he had the greater advantage of a closer familiarity with the ideas he wished to embody in his hymns, and with their sources in the Scriptures, and a more practical capacity for the application of his powers to the object in hand. His hymns are always in place; they are hymns of the Breviary, not brilliant poems on Breviary subjects by a poet writing for glory. I do not say that Charles Coffin was the better man; God only knows; and I must confess to a liking for “the gay canon of St. Victor” which the rector of the university does not inspire in me. There is a Burns-like humanity in him and his harmless vanities which wins our love still, as it did that of his contemporaries. But Charles Coffin had a certain suitableness to his work which Jean Santeul lacked. He was an eminently dignified, respectable, and useful character, who impressed himself upon a whole generation of young Frenchmen, many of whom rose to eminence at the bar, in the public service, and even in the army. They all looked back to him with great respect. I wonder if they loved him as Mark Hopkins and George Allen are loved by those who studied under them. And in Charles Coffin’s hymns you meet the same admirable traits as in his public work. He is a man of enlightenment, dignity, devoutness, and eminent usefulness, without a touch of Rabelaisian abandon to remind you of Béranger’s saying: “All we Français are children of the great François.” Of that he reminds you only in his sparkling, effervescent ode to Champagne, in reply to Bénigne Grenan’s overpraise of Burgundy. It was to be expected that when the advocates of liturgical uniformity made their attack upon the Paris Breviary, beginning with Gueranger’s Institutions Liturgiques (1840-42), it was Santeul whom they especially attacked, although not he but Coffin was responsible for its hymnology.
Charles Coffin’s hymns have a high level of excellence, which makes it difficult to anthologize among them. Certainly not the worst are the four Advent hymns (Instantis adventum Dei; Jordanis oras praevia; Statuta decreto Dei; and In noctis umbra desides); that for Christmas (Jam desinant suspiria) and the Vesper hymn (O luce qui mortalibus); the Passion hymn (Opprobriis Jesu satur); the fine series of seven hymns for the nocturn services throughout the week, based on the seven days of Creation; and the hymn for Epiphany (Quae stella sole pulchrior). These and most of his acknowledged hymns are known to us in the translations of Williams, Chandler, and Mant, and several of these are in Hymns Ancient and Modern.
As an editor he altered and even tinkered, as well as adapted and wrote hymns. Even Jean Santeul did not escape his hand. One of the hymns ascribed to him in the Paris Breviary is a cento from no less than twelve of his own hymns. From the wrath he showed when such changes were made in his lifetime, we may infer that he would have liked this as little as did John Wesley. And the older hymns were handled in the same way. A good example of Charles Coffin’s method of recasting old hymns is furnished by his version of the Ad coenam Agni providi, which already has been given in its original shape and in that of the Roman Breviary. With these the reader may compare Coffin’s revision, which will be seen to vary very widely from the old text of the ninth century:
Forti tegente brachio,
Evasimus Rubrum mare,
Tandem durum perfidi
Jugum tyranni fregimus.
Nunc ergo laetas vindici
Grates rependamus Deo;