“It follows that, as people in these Christian hymns did not look for the grace of classic expression or the pleasurable emotion of the instant—in a word, what we expect from a work of art, they produced the strangest effects at once after their introduction. Just as Christian hands overthrew the statues and temples of the gods in honor of the unseen God, so these hymns contained a germ which was to bring about the death of the pagan poetry. Not only were those hymns to gods and goddesses, heroes and geniuses, regarded by the Christians as the work of unbelievers or misbelievers, but the germ from which they sprang, the poetic and sportive fancy, the pleasure and rejoicing of the peoples in their national festivals, were condemned as a school of evil demons; yes, even the national pride, to which those songs appealed, was despised as a perilous though splendid sin. The old religion had outlived its time, the new had won its victory, when the absurdity of idol-worship and pagan superstitions, the disorders and abominations which attended the festivals of Bacchus, Cybele, and Aphrodite, were brought to the light of day. Whatever of poetry was associated with these was a work of the devil. There began a new age for poetry, music, speech, the sciences, and indeed for the whole direction of human thought.”
As the Romanticist movement gained ground in Germany, attention to the early hymns increased. Even Goethe, the weltkind among the prophets, was influenced. Hence his use of the Dies Irae in the first part of Faust, although he was pagan enough to care for nothing at Assisi except the Roman remains. A. W. Schlegel made a number of translations for the Musen-Almanach. Then came the long series of German translators, of whom A. J. Rambach, A. L. Follen (brother of Professor Charles Follen of Harvard), Karl Simrock (1850 and 1866), and G. A. Koenigsfeld (1847 and 1865) are the most notable. Much more important to us are the German collectors: G. A. Björn (a Dane, 1818), J. C. von Zabuesnig (1822 and 1830), H. A. Daniel (Blüthenstrauss, 1840; Thesaurus, 1841-56), F. J. Mone (1853-55), C. B. Moll (1861 and 1868), P. Gall Morel (1866), Joseph Kehrein (1873). To the unwearied thoroughness of these editors, more than of any other laborers in this field, we owe our ampler access to the treasures of Latin hymnody. But what field of research is there in which the scholarship of Germany has not laid the rest of the world under obligations?
In English literature the Romanticist movement begins properly with Sir Walter Scott. Himself a Presbyterian, he was brought up on the old Scotch Psalm-book, for which he entertained the same affection as did Burns, Edward Irving, Campbell, Carlyle, and Archdeacon Hare. He opposed any attempt to improve it, on the ground that it was, “with all its acknowledged occasional harshness, so beautiful that any alterations must eventually prove only so many blemishes.” But his literary tastes led him to a lofty appreciation of the Anglican liturgy—a circumstance which has led many to class him as an Episcopalian—and equally for the poetry of the mediaeval hymns. His vigorous version of a part of the Dies Irae inserted in The Lady of the Lake (1805) gives him his smallest claim to mention in the history of hymnody. It was the new atmosphere he carried into the educated world, his fresh and hearty admiration of admirable things in the Middle Ages, which had been thought barbarous, that makes him important to us. He gave the English and Scottish people new weights and measures, new standards of critical judgment, which emancipated them from narrow, pseudo-Protestant traditions. He made the great Church of undivided Western Europe intelligible. No doubt many follies resulted from this novel lesson, the worst of all being contempt for Luther and his associates in the Reformation. The negations which attend such revolutions in opinion always are foolish exaggerations. It is the affirmations which are valuable and which remain. And Romanticism for more than half a century has been affecting the religious, the social, the intellectual life of Great Britain and America in a thousand ways, and with, on the whole, positive and beneficial results. Its most powerful manifestation was in the Oxford movement,[30] but both in its causes and its effects it has transcended the limits which separate the divided forces of Protestantism.
Naturally the Oxford movement was the first to turn attention to the hymns of the Middle Ages, or what it regarded as such. We use this qualified expression because its leaders at the outset were much better poets than hymnological scholars, and welcomed anything in the shape of a Latin hymn as “primitive,” no matter what. Isaac Williams, in the British Magazine in 1830, published a series of translations of “primitive hymns” which he gathered into a volume in 1839. They were from the Paris Breviary, of whose hymns only one in fourteen were older than 1685, and most of them not yet a hundred years old. Rev. John Chandler, in his Hymns of the Primitive Church (1837), drew on Santeul and Coffin with equal freedom, evidently supposing he was going back to the early ages for his originals. Bishop Mant, in his Ancient Hymns from the Roman Breviary (1837), did a little better, although not half-a-dozen hymns in that Breviary are unaltered from their primitive forms, and many are no older than the fifteenth or sixteenth century. Rev. Edward Caswall, an Oxford convert to the Church of Rome, naturally confined his Lyra Catholica (1849) to the Breviary hymns, supplementing those of Rome with some from Paris. The first collection published by Dr. Newman (Hymni Ecclesiae, Pars I., 1839) was confined to the Paris Breviary, but with the notice that they “had no equal claim to antiquity” with “the discarded collections of the ante-reform era.” But he claimed on rather slight ground that they “breathe an ancient spirit, and even where they are the work of one pen, are the joint and indivisible contribution of many ancient minds.” This is an opinion of the work of Santeul and Coffin in which neither Cardinal Newman nor the Gallican Church would agree to-day.
In fact, these English scholars, with their constant habit of making Latin verse after classic models from their school-days, and their entire want of familiarity with post-classic Latin, found what pleased them best in the two Breviaries of Rome and Paris. With that they seemed likely to stop. It was Dr. John Mason Neale (1851-58) who, among translators, first broke these bounds, went to the older sources, and introduced to English readers, both by his collections and his translations, the great hymns of the Western Church. As a translator he leaves much to be desired. His ideas as to faithful reproduction of the form of his originals are vague. His hymns too often might be said to be based on the Latin text rather than to reproduce it. But they are spirited poems, whose own vigor and beauty sent readers to the original, and they were not disappointed.
From that time we have had a series of excellent workers in this field—John Keble, Rev. W. J. Blew (1855), Mr. J. D. Chambers (1857 and 1866), Rev. J. W. Hewett (1859), Sir Henry Baker (1861 and 1868), Rev. Herbert Kynaston (1862), Rev. J. Trend (1862), Rev. P. S. Worsley (1863), Earl Nelson (1857 and 1868), Rev. Richard F. Littledale (1867), R. Campbell, of the Anglo-Catholic party; and Dean Stanley, Mrs. Charles (1858 and 1866) and Dr. Hamilton Magill (1876) outside its ranks. Theirs have been no inconsiderable part of those labors which have made the last thirty years the golden age of English hymn-writing, surpassing even the era of the Methodist revival.
In America the work was begun in 1840 with a modest little volume published at Auburn, in New York, and ascribed by Mr. Duffield to Dr. Henry Mills of Auburn Theological Seminary, who in 1856 also published a volume of translations of German hymns. His earlier book was The Hymn of Hildebert and the Ode of Xavier, with English Versions, and contained thirty-five duodecimo pages. Next in order came Dr. John Williams, Bishop of Connecticut, with Ancient Hymns of the Holy Church (1845). Dr. William R. Williams of New York, in his address on “The Conservative Principle in our Literature,” delivered in 1843, made a reference to the Dies Irae, which gave him the occasion to publish in an Appendix the literary history of the great hymn, giving the text along with Dr. Trench’s version and his own. This seems to have given the impulse which has made America so prolific in translations of that hymn, only Germany surpassing us in this respect. Dr. Abraham Coles may be said to have led off with his volume, containing thirteen translations in 1847. But it was not until after the war for the Union that the productive powers of American translators were brought into play. Much, no doubt, was due to foreign impulse, especially from Dr. Trench and Dr. Newman; but it is notable that in America far more work has been done outside than inside the Episcopalian communion.
Dr. Coles again in 1866, Mr. Duffield in 1867, Chancellor Benedict in 1869, Hon. N. B. Smithers in 1879 and 1881, and Mr. John L. Hayes in 1887 published volumes of translations. But far more numerous are the poets whose versions of Latin hymns have appeared in various periodicals or in collections like Professor Coppée’s Songs of Praise (1866), Dr. Schaff’s Christ in Song (1869), Odenheimer and Bird’s Songs of the Spirit (1871), Dr. H. C. Fish’s Heaven in Song (1874), Frank Foxcroft’s Resurgit (1879), and Dr. Schaff and Arthur Gilman’s Library of Sacred Poetry (1881 and 1886). Of these contributing poets we mention Dr. E. A. Washburn, whose translations have been collected in his posthumous volume, Voices from a Busy Life (1883); Dr. Ray Palmer, our chief sacred singer, whose versions of the O esca viatorum and the Jesu dulcis memoria are as classic as his “My faith looks up to Thee;” Dr. A. R. Thompson, to whom the present volume is under great obligations; Rev. J. Anketell, another of its benefactors; Rev. M. Woolsey Stryker, Rev. D. Y. Heisler, Rev. Franklin Johnson, D.D., and Rev. W. S. McKenzie, D.D. Besides these we may mention the anthology of translations published by the Rev. F. Wilson (1859), of texts by Professor F. A. March (1874 and 1883), and of both texts and translations by Judge C. C. Nott (1865 and subsequent years).
It is not, however, only as literature, but in the actual use of the American churches, that the Latin hymns have made a place for themselves. Since 1859, when the Andover professors published the Sabbath Hymn and Tune-Book, with original translations furnished by Dr. Ray Palmer, there has been a peaceful revolution in American hymnology. Every one of the larger denominations and many of the smaller have provided themselves with new hymn-books, in which the resources of English, foreign, and ancient hymnology have been employed freely, and with more exacting taste as to sense and form, than characterized the hymn-books of the era before the war. While the compilers have drawn freely upon Caswall, Neale, Chandler, and the Anglican Hymns Ancient and Modern (1861), in many cases original translations were given, as in Hymns of the Church for the (Dutch) Reformed Church, of which Dr. A. R. Thompson was one of the editors; and Dr. Charles Robinson’s Laudes Domini (1884), to which Mr. Duffield contributed. And there is evidence that the hymns thus brought into Church use from the storehouse of the earlier Christian ages have helped thoughtful Christians to realize more fully the great principle of the Communion of the saints—to realize that all the faithful of the present are bound in spiritual brotherhood with those who held to the same Head and walked in the light of the same faith in bygone centuries, even though it was with stumbling and amid shadows, from which our path by God’s good providence has been set free.