The Latin Hymn-writers and Their Hymns

by Samuel Willoughby Duffield

It is not wonderful that when the Anglo-Catholics sought to revive the Primer as “the authorized book of Family and Private Prayer” on the same footing as the Prayer book, they took the liberty of substituting modern versions of the hymns for these “authorized” translations.[27] But the Primer, whatever its authority, never possessed that much more important requisite to success—vitality. A very few editions sufficed for the demand, and Bishop Cosin’s attempt to revive it in Charles I.’s time only provoked a Puritan outcry against both him and it. Rev. Gerard Moultrie has attempted to revive it in our own time, as “the only book of private devotion which has received the sanction of the English Church,” and has not achieved even thus much of success. No Prynne has assailed him.

In the Book of Common Prayer, besides such “canticles” as the Gloria in Excelsis and the Te Deum, there is but one hymn, an English version of the Veni, Creator Spiritus in the Ordination Service. It is the wordiest of all known versions, rendering one hundred and five Latin by three hundred and fifty-seven English words, but is not without its old-fashioned felicities. The revisers of 1661 cut it down by omitting just half of it, and modernized the English in a number of places. Its very verbosity seems to have suggested Bishop Cosin’s terse version, containing but four more words than the original, which, however, it somewhat abridges. This was inserted in 1661 as an alternate version. The author of the paraphrase in the Prayer-Book is unknown. It is not Bishop Coverdale, as his, although translated at second-hand from Luther, as, indeed, all his hymns are from some German source, is far closer and less wordy.[28] It also was adopted into the old Scottish Psalter of the Reformation, where it appears in the appendix, along with a metrical version of the Apostle’s Creed and other “uninspired compositions.”

From the Reformation until about fifty years ago, there was among English-speaking people no interest in Latin hymnology worth speaking of. A few Catholic poets, like Crashaw and Dryden, honored their Church versions from the hymns of the Breviary. But even John Austin, a Catholic convert of 1640, when he prepared his Devotions in the Ancient Way of Offices after the model of the Breviary, wrote for it hymns of his own instead of translating from the Latin. Some of these (“Blessed be Thy love, dear Lord,” and “Hark, my soul, how everything”) have become a part of our general wealth. Of course some versions of a homely sort had to be made for Catholic books of devotion, and I possess The Evening Office of the Church in Latin and English (London, 1725), in which the Vesper hymns of the Roman Breviary are closely and roughly versified. It is notable that “the old hymns as they are generally sung in churches”—i.e., the hymns as they stood before the revision of 1631, are printed as an appendix to the book, showing how slow English Catholics were to accept the modernization of the hymns which the papacy had sanctioned nearly a century before.

Mr. Orby Shipley, in his Annus Sanctus (London, 1884), gives a large number of these early versions from the Roman Catholic Primers of 1619, 1684, 1685, and 1706; from the Evening Office of 1710, 1725, and 1785; and from the Divine Office of 1763 and 1780. The translations of 1619 have been ascribed to William Drummond, of Hawthornden, and those of 1706 to Dryden. Drummond was the first Scotchman who adopted English as the language of literature, and although a Protestant, he belonged to the Catholicizing party represented by William Forbes, the first Protestant bishop of Edinburgh. Three hymns are given in Sir Walter Scott’s edition of Dryden on the authority of English Roman Catholic tradition, the best known being his version of the Veni Creator Spiritus. These three are found in the Primer of 1706, along with versions of the other hymns of the Roman Breviary sufficiently like them to suggest that they are all by the same hand. But this judgment is disputed.

Among Protestants the neglect was as great. So profuse a writer of hymns for the Christian year as George Wither translated only the Te Deum and the Veni, Creator Spiritus into English verse.[29] Tate and Brady, in their Supplement (1703) to their New Version of the Psalms (1696), published a translation of the Veni, Creator Spiritus. But Bishop Symon Patrick was the only hymn-writer of that age who may be said to have given any special attention to Latin hymns. His hymns were chiefly translations from that source, especially Prudentius, and Lord Selborne mentions that of Alleluia, dulce carmen, as the best.

The Methodist revival, which did so much to enrich our store of hymns, and which called attention anew to those of Germany, accomplished nothing for us as regards Latin hymns. The Earl of Roscommon’s translation of the Dies Irae (1717), and Dr. Johnson’s affecting reference to the stanza,

Quaerens me sedisti lassus, ...

stand almost alone in that age. It was not until the Romantic movement in Germany and then in England broke the bonds of a merely classic culture, taught the world the beauty of Gothic art, and obliged men to revise their estimate of the Middle Ages, that the singers of the praises which sounded through those earlier centuries had a fair chance to be judged at their real worth. The forerunner of that movement was Johann Gottfried von Herder, who indeed may be said to have anticipated the whole intellectual movement of the past century, Darwinism not excepted. From his friend and master Hamann, “the Magus of the North,” he had learned “the necessity for a complete and harmonious expression of all the varied faculties of man,” and that “whatever is isolated or the product of a single faculty is to be condemned.” This made him as much discontented with the eighteenth century and its literature and philosophy of the enlightened understanding, as Hamann himself was. It was the foundation for that Catholic taste which enabled him to appreciate the excellence of all those popular literatures which are the outflow of the life of whole peoples. His Voices of the Peoples did for the Continent what Bishop Percy’s Reliques did for England, and did it much better. He saw that “the people and a common sentiment are the foundations of a true poetry,” and the literature of the schools and that of polite society are equally condemned to sterility. For this reason he had small respect for that classic Latin literature at whose bar every modern production was impleaded. He found far more genuine life and power in the Latin poems of the Jesuit father, Jacob Balde, and still more in the hymns of the Latin Church. His Letters for the Promotion of Humanity (1794-96) contain a passage of classic importance:

“The hymns which Christianity introduced had for their basis those old Hebrew Psalms which very soon found their way into the Church, if not as songs or anthems, at any rate as prayers.... The songs of Mary and of Zacharias, the Angelic Salutation, the Nunc Dimittis of Simeon, which open the New Testament, gave character more immediately to the Christian hymns. Their gentler voice was more suitable to the spirit of Christianity than even the loud trumpet note of that old jubilant Hallelujah, although that note was found capable of many applications, and was now strengthened with the words of prophet or psalmist, now adapted to gentler strains. Over the graves of the dead, whose resurrection was already present to the spirit’s vision, in caves and catacombs, first were heard these psalms of repentance and prayer, of sorrow and hope, until after the public establishment of Christianity, they stepped out of the dark into the light, out of solitude into splendid churches, before consecrated altars, and now assumed a like splendor in their expression. There is hardly any one who can listen to the Jam moesta quiesce querula of Prudentius without feeling his heart touched by its moving strains, or who can hear the funeral sequence Dies irae, dies illa, without a shudder, or whom so many other hymns, each with its own character—e.g., Veni, Redemptor gentium; Vexilla Regis prodeunt; Salvete flores Martyrum; Pange, lingua, gloriosi, etc., will fail to be carried into that frame of feeling which each seeks to awaken, and with all its humility of form and its churchly peculiarities, never fails to command. In one there sounds the voice of prayer; another could find its accompaniment only in the harp; in yet another the trumpet rings, or there sounds the thousand-voiced organ, and so on.

“If we seek after the reason of this remarkable effect, which we feel in hearing these old Christian hymns, we find it somewhat peculiar. It is anything but the novelty of the thoughts which here touches and there shakes us. Thoughts in these hymns are found but sparingly. Many are merely solemn recitations of a well-known story, or they are familiar petitions and prayers. They nearly all repeat each other. Nor is it frequently surprisingly fine and novel sentiments with which they somehow permeate us; the novel and the fine are not objects in the hymns. What, then, is it that touches us? Simplicity and Veracity. Here sounds the speech of a general confession of one heart and one faith. Most of them are constructed either so as to be fit for use every day of the year, or so as to be used on the festivals of the various seasons. As these come round there comes with them in constant recurrence their rehearsal of Christian doctrines. There is nothing superfine in the hymns as regards either emotion, or duty, or consolation. There reigns in all of them a general popularity of content, expressed in great accents. He who seeks novel thoughts in a Te Deum or a Salve Regina looks for them in the wrong place. It is just what is every day and always known, which here is to serve as the garb of truth. The hymn is meant to be an ambrosial offering of nature, deathless like that, and ever returning.