I have a friend who always calls--when he remembers to, for alas! he
sometimes forgets--the Methodist Church building in our village, a
“conventicle.” I wish he did not sometimes forget, for nothing makes
me so at peace with my hereditary nonconformity as to hear an Anglican
imply, by such verbal affectations, what he thinks of the dissidence
of dissent. Methodism is as foreign to me as Anglicanism; yet, I
doubt not, the Epworth League sings, in its handsome “conventicle,”
just the hymns that of old were sung by the Y. P. S. C. E. It is
many a year since I attended a Y. P. S. C. E. meeting; and I have an
idea--it is almost a fear--that _Gospel Hymns, No. 5_, is by this
time _Gospel Hymns, No. 10_, and that some of the most haunting
melodies are gone therefrom. Perhaps the “Endeavorers” are now chanting
_Hymns Ancient and Modern_. But I hope not. Oh, I cannot think it!
When life grows very dreary; when the Hindenburg line seems to turn
from shadow to substance; when the Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’
Deputies has indulged in a new “democratic” vagary; when flour has
gone up two dollars more a barrel and the priceless potato is but a
soggy pearl, deserving to be cast before swine; when another member of
the family has broken a leg or had appendicitis--then my husband (he,
too, of yore an “Endeavorer”) and I are wont to burst, simultaneously,
mechanically, unthinking and unconspiring, into song. And the songs we
hear each other humming in separate recesses of the house are _Gospel
Hymns_. Humming, we converge upon the drawing-room from our
different retreats; and sometimes we look each other in the eye and say
hardily, “Let’s.” Then we sit down and incite each other to a desperate
vocalism. We see how many we can remember, out of our evangelistic
youth, and we sing them all. We remember a good many, if truth be told;
and once I found a rapt huddle of colored servants on the stair-landing
getting a free “revival.” Neither of us has a voice worth mentioning,
so I think that we must, without realizing it, have reproduced the
fervor along with the words.
They were cannily arranged, those Moody and Sankey hymns: if you sing
them at all, you cannot help pounding down on the essential words. They
wallow in beat and accent. “A _Shelter_ in the _Time_ of
_Storm_.” We usually begin with that. It is ineluctable. But oh,
how I wish that either of us could remember more than one “verse” of
Well, wife, I’ve found the model church,
And worshipped there to-day;
It made me think of good old times
Before my hair was gray.
I have never heard it sung--I never “belonged” to the Y. P. S. C.
E.--but my husband says that he has. My husband also says that he
has heard “the trundle-bed one.” I do not believe it, though he is a
truthful man. I cannot believe it; the less, that he remembers none of
the words, and that it is only I, who recall, visually, in the lower
corner of a page,--
Poking (perhaps it was another verb) ’mid the dust and rafters
There I found my trundle-bed.
A slight altercation always develops here. Why should he be more
royalist than the king? It is not conceivable that it was ever
_sung_; and even he cannot remember the tune; so we join forces in
“To the Work, to the Work,” or “There Shall Be Showers of Blessing.”
(Mercy-drops round us are _fall_-ing,
But for the _showers_ we plead.)
He has an uncanny and inexplicable prejudice against “God Be with You
Till We Meet Again”--perhaps because they always sang it for the last
one. But I can usually get him to “oblige” with a solo--“Throw Out
the Life-Line”--which I am sure was not in “No. 5,” because we never,
never sang it; though I do remember hearing a returning delegate to
a Y. P. S. C. E. convention say that it was the one “the people of
Montreal seemed to like best.” Somewhere in the nineties, Endeavorers
in thousands sang it all up and down Sherbrooke Street, apparently.
Well: I am like the people of Montreal. It always “gets” me, in the
dissenting marrow of my dissenting soul; and when my husband has
“obliged” me with it, I am ready to forget the Council of Workmen’s and
Soldiers’ Deputies. What _can_ the devil do in the face of “Throw
Out the Life-Line,” and its “linked sweetness long drawn out”?
By all of which it is made evident that, in the matter of hymns, mine
is the “sensual ear.” (Not so my husband’s: he sings them in the
critical spirit, as he might illustrate a violation of rhetoric. He
loathes “Throw Out the Life-Line,” even while the chorus makes his
voice appeal and yearn in spite of him. As I said, he does it only to
oblige.) The church of my choosing, if not of my profession, is the
same as that of my friend who talks of “conventicles.” There I sing
_Hymns Ancient and Modern_ (or that American corruption thereof,
the _Hymnal_) with the most conforming. And certainly, except
for a few time-honored chants which they share with all Dissenters,
their hymns are to me “ditties of no tone.” My husband disagrees with
me; but he is not, equally with me, the predestined prey of the brass
band. He is better educated than I; has listened oftener at twilight
to the enchanted choirs of New College and Magdalen. He likes the
non-committal melodies of the _Hymnal_ far, far better than the
sentimental _parti pris_ of _Gospel Hymns_.
I know as well as he does that the sentimental quality is of a sort
that ought not to be there at all. I know that the music of “Throw
Out the Life-Line” belongs morally with the music of “Old Black
Joe,” and “Oh, Promise Me,” and “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old
Town To-night.” I know that the appeal of that tune is sensuous and
emotional and personal, and, for a hymn, all, all wrong. I realize
that, for church, Gregorian is the only wear; and that the less you
diverge therefrom, the more decent you are. I, too, prefer Bach and
Palestrina, and, for congregational singing, the oldest Latin hymns you
can get. I can even see that the aridity and sameness of the Anglican
“hymn-tunes” are more dignified, and more to the purpose, than the
plangent and catchy refrains by which Sankey lured “wandering boys”
back to be safe-folded with “the ninety and nine.” And yet, when my
husband (by request) croons “Throw Out the Life-Line,” I cannot resist.
I am evangelized.
True, I perceived this perniciousness early. Perhaps the white light
dawned on me when, in Y. P. S. C. E. days, an older friend (who was in
love) confided to me that the words of a certain Gospel Hymn seemed to
her not altogether reverent: they could so easily be applied to a human
love-affair. She was quite right, I think. Some of us have felt the
same about Crashaw and Giles Fletcher. But though the words were, in
all conscience, carnal enough, I believe it was the tune that did the
trick and set her dreaming of her young hero.
For I am his, and he is mine,
Forever and forever.
Oh, the yearning of that refrain: slow and honeyed and melancholy
as “My Old Kentucky Home” or “Way Down Upon the Suwanee River”!
Musically, doubtless, not so good; but musically of the same school,
and suggestive--it, too--of plantations and moonlight and banjos and
rich, heart-rending negro voices. My friend was right: they are not
in the best tradition of reverence, those Moody and Sankey hymns. And
yet--here’s the rub--why do we remember them, when all but the most
universal of the hymns we sang in church and sang much oftener than
these, have gone beyond recapturing? My husband resents remembering
them; he would far rather remember more worthy things. But I do not:
I would not, for anything, lose them out of the rag-bag which is my
mind. I am not sure I would not rather lose certain stanzas from the
Greek Anthology, which come to my lips in much the same unvolitional
fashion. From those refrains I reconstruct a whole moral and social
world, even as Cuvier reconstructed his mastodon. You remember what
the “Evening Hymn” did for Mottram and Lowndes in “The End of the
Passage”? Just that “I Know that My Redeemer Lives” does for me.
And--this is the point--“Rock of Ages” and “Holy, Holy, Holy,” do not
do it; though I knew these even earlier, and am still, on occasion,
singing them. So it is not all a question of association and the power
of youthful memories. It is the very quality of the music--the words
were negligible, when they were not atrocious--that touched in me, and
can still touch, something popular, emotional, vulgar; something very
low-brow and democratic, not to say mobbish. “The sensual ear.”
Even in youth, I had the sense to differentiate. “Jerusalem the
Golden,” discovered in another hymn-book than our own, was for many
years my favorite hymn--even during those years when I was singing
“Beulah Land” and “Wonderful Words of Life.” I knew it was better; I
knew I liked it better; I knew that it had more to do with religion
than all the “Beulah Lands” ever written. True, the words helped; and
the words of the Gospel Hymns were a hindrance, even then. But my soul
recognized the validity, the reality of the music. “Jerusalem the
Golden” remained my favorite until “The Son of God Goes Forth to War”
succeeded it in my affections; always to be, until I die, my very
favorite. And even while we sang--
And view the shining glory shore,
My heaven, my home, for evermore.
I had memories of something still better than “Jerusalem the Golden”:
memories of an interval in a French convent where we chanted the
Magnificat to its proper plain-song; Though, even there--but I shall
come to that later.
Not long ago, we had a friend staying with us who was bred a Romanist.
How Moody and Sankey got mentioned, I do not know--but they did; and
our friend insisted that Moody and Sankey could not conceivably be
so bad as the modern Catholic hymns. We exclaimed; she reaffirmed.
There was nothing for it but to put the burning question to the
proof. Quietly, by the fire, we staged a little contest. We sang our
Gospel Hymns; and she--well, she sang dreadful things. There was in
particular a hymn to St. Joseph, beloved of sodalities.... No, I think
her “exhibit” was really worse than ours. It had the rag-time flatness
without the rag-time catchiness, or the crooning negro quality. Bred
up in part on such modern by-products of the Holy Catholic Church, no
wonder that she succumbed utterly to my husband’s rendition of “Throw
Out the Life-Line.” “I think it’s lovely,” she said; siding with me, to
his great chagrin. How I wished that our friend of the “conventicles”
were there to decide between us--he who in his youth was forbidden to
accompany his friends to Y. P. S. C. E. meetings as he might have been
forbidden to go to dime-museums. But he has no ear--“sensual” or other.
Perhaps he could not have helped.
Our Catholic friend’s exhibit gave me pause. I knew that in France
they sing, nowadays, hymns unworthy of Gothic architecture. Not so
many years ago, in a beautiful French cathedral which I was by way of
frequenting, I heard the children of some sodality or con-fraternity
pouring forth as poor a piece of holy rag-time as any conventicle has
ever echoed. It jerked me back into the past, violently, as Hassan’s
carpet must have jerked its fortunate owner through space.
Vierge, notre espérance,
Étends sur nous ton bras.
Sauve, sauve la France,
Ne l’abandonne pas,
Ne l’abandonne pas.
So we sang it, too, at the Assomption, in happier days, each with a
veil and a candle, winding in and out among the green alleys of the
convent park. But the young Tourangeaux went on to sing worse things:
songs less catholic, more evangelical, with words more bitter and tones
more shrill. I escaped, to return only at the hour of Benediction,
when I knew that the “O Salutaris Hostia” and “Tantum Ergo” would mount
again with the incense towards the rich mediæval windows.
I fear it is true, as our Catholic friend said, that the Church has
fallen musically, as it has done architecturally, on evil days. Well:
these shrill and senseless tunes are their equivalent for our Moody and
Sankey. Even in conventicles, we have more dignified hymn-books for
use in “church” as opposed to Sunday-school or Y. P. S. C. E., and the
like. And as our Primary Department (of the Sunday-school) was handed
over to the works of Fanny Crosby (did she write
Roses in bloom,
Filling the room.
With perfume rich and rare.
I wonder? Anyhow, she wrote most of them), so the young Catholics in
both France and America are handed over to the musical divagations of
ill-educated priests. It is a pity; for they have a tradition that
cannot be bettered. _My_ ancestors sang lustily out of the old
_Bay Psalm Book_:
Ye monsters of the mighty deep,
Your Maker’s praises spout;
Up from the sands ye codlings peep.
And wag your tails about.
But, at the same period, _their_ ancestors were singing the Latin
hymns of the Middle Ages in undegenerate solemnity. It is natural
enough, perhaps, that I should have emerged on “There’s a Light in the
Valley for Me”; but why should they have emerged on “Souvenez-vous,
Jésus,” and the Mariolatrous wailing of “Im-mac-u-late, Im-mac-u-late”?
Take as fine a Protestant hymn as, on the whole, we have inherited--“O
God, Our Help in Ages Past.” Its tune is, to my thinking, bad:
difficult to sing and monotonous to hear. But in the very church that
these poor French infants are innocently desecrating, a few hours, more
or less, see a whole congregation chanting, with passionless and awful
reverence,
Parce, Domine, parce populo tuo; nec in æternum irascaris nobis.
Whoever has heard that welling slowly from crowded choir, nave, and
transept, the coifed peasant and the trained _séminariste_ singing
in unison (no staginess of part-singing there!), and has joined his
voice to the multitudinous supplication, will not cease to regret that
modern vulgarity is as Catholic as it is Protestant.
It was the most delightful of Huysmans’s perversities to contend, in
all seriousness, that the Devil, driven out of an immemorial haunt of
his own near Lourdes by the advent in that spot of the Blessed Virgin,
took his sullen revenge on the æsthetic sense of her priests. He could
no longer hold his filthy Sabbaths there; but he could and did bewitch
the clergy into making Lourdes a thing of ugliness. Their taste went
wrong with everything they touched in Lourdes; and while Satan could
not prevent the Blessed Virgin from working miracles, he could still
bring it about that the faithful should be healed amid the most hideous
architectural surroundings. Perhaps Huysmans would have credited the
modern Catholic music unhesitatingly to the devil.
But certainly Moody and Sankey were not clerics of Lourdes. Nor could
the Presbyterians who first sang the rhymed version of the Twenty-Third
Psalm to the air of “So bin ich vergessen, vergessen bin ich” be
suspected of any part in the Devil’s private feuds with the Virgin.
Indeed, the particular Presbyterians whom I have heard sing it thus had
not, I fancy, much more reverence for the one than for the other.
I do not think that we can account for _Gospel Hymns No. 5_ by the
Huysmans formula. Even the hymn to St. Joseph, beloved of sodalities,
is, I believe, mere modern pandering to the uncultured majority:
revivalism in essence, like Moody and Sankey and the Salvation Army
and Billy Sunday. But at least the Catholics have this advantage:
that though they too have indulged in operatic music and have even
sunk to “Vierge, notre espérance,” they still hear from their choirs
the ancient music and the ancient words. You lose the sodalities and
confraternities when you hear once more the familiar “Tantum Ergo” (I
do not mean the florid one that they sing at St. Roch in Paris, and
elsewhere); the new vulgarity is forgotten, as many vulgarities have
been touched and then forgotten by Rome, in her time.
I used to think that the worst of our bad Protestant hymns was their
ignoring of the human intelligence.
Many giants great and tall,
Stalking through the land,
Headlong to the earth would fall
If met by Daniel’s Band.
(My fortunate husband sang it in his youth.) But even that, while it
could have a religious meaning, I should say, only for a sub-normal
intelligence, is not a deliberate and explicit defiance of the
intellect of man.
Verbum caro, panem verum
Verbo camera efficit:
Fitque sanguis Christi merum;
Et si sensus deficit,
Ad firmandum cor sincerum
Sola fides sufficit.
Tantum ergo sacramentum
Veneremur cernui,
Et antiquum documentum
Novo cedat ritui:
Præstet fides supplementum
Sensuum defectui.
It took St. Thomas Aquinas, Doctor Angelicus, thus to state, in one
supreme utterance, the whole case against the Higher Criticism.
No, I do not think that the sense of a hymn counts so much. The
mediæval “Ave Maris Stella” has not much more to recommend it,
philosophically speaking, than the hymn with the “Im-mac-u-late,
Im-mac-u-late” refrain. A poem, even a religious poem, is good poetry
or bad poetry, and that is all there is to it. “From Greenland’s Icy
Mountains” is a silly poem, and “The Son of God Goes Forth to War” is
a rather fine poem; and Bishop Heber wrote both. But the permanent
superiority of the latter is in the music to which it is set. One
Presbyterian sect sings, I believe, nothing but the Psalms--rather
unfortunately metricized, to be sure--and their church singing is
the dreariest in the world. Yet the Psalms are rated high. “Onward,
Christian Soldiers” gets its appeal from Sir Arthur Sullivan and not
from the author. I do not believe that “Nearer, My God, to Thee” would
have been the favorite hymn of the late President McKinley were it not
for the slow, swinging tempo, which needs only a little quickening to
be an excellent waltz, with all the emotional appeal of good waltz
music.
On the whole, _Hymns Ancient and Modern_ are far better, from the
point of view of poetry, than _Gospel Hymns, No. 5_--but they
have not converted half so many people. The elect, the high-brows,
may say what they like: if you are doing your evangelizing on the
grand scale, the “sensual ear” must be pleased. I do not believe that
the music I have referred to, of the “Tantum Ergo” or the “Parce,
Domine,” would ever convert the crowd in a tent or a tabernacle--even
if D. L. Moody or Fanny Crosby wrote new words to it. But if you let a
grammar-school pupil hack words out of the New Testament and set them
to the tune of “Massa’s in the Cold, Cold Ground”--well, it would be
strange if some one were not converted. You may be very sure that the
Roman Catholic Church has not taken to vulgar and catchy hymns without
a set purpose of winning souls.
At the Cross, at the Cross, where I first saw the light
And the burden of my sin rolled away,
It was there by faith I received my sight,
And now I am happy all the day.
The last line might almost have been lifted bodily from one of Stephen
Foster’s negro-melodies. It has the very lilt of
My old Kentucky home far away.
And it is only one of many in _Gospel Hymns, No. 5_. That is why
my husband remembers them, in spite of himself. He may contemn them,
but he cannot forget. There is hardly one of them that would not
consort happily with the right kind of brass band. They connote crowds
and the “emotion of multitude.” So, to me, does the “Parce, Domine”
connote crowds--but crowds awe-struck, unweeping, and in no mood for
stimulation by a cornet accompaniment. There is a cardinal difference.
The success of almost any Gospel Hymn depends on an emotional appeal
very like that of Kipling’s banjo:
And the tunes that mean so much to you alone--
Common tunes that make you choke and blow your nose,
Vulgar tunes that bring the laugh that brings the groan--
I can rip your very heartstrings out with those.
Whatever Bach and Palestrina and Scarlatti and good Gregorian do to
you--well, it is not that. Whereas almost any good Gospel Hymn gets
you, if it gets you at all, in the banjo way. There is the revivalistic
essence in all of them. And when the Catholics wish to be revivalistic,
they imitate, rather badly, the Protestant “hymn-tune.”
Most of my friends are so truly high-brow that they cannot be “got” in
the banjo way. They do not like cornet solos; and brass bands playing
negro-melodies leave them dry-eyed. They honestly prefer the Kniesel
Quartet or a Brahms symphony. Their arid and exquisite æstheticism
rejects these low appeals. Did I not say that my husband loathes “Throw
Out the Life-Line” even while he is reducing me to an emotional
crumple? I refuse to admit that I am incapable of that same arid and
exquisite æstheticism; but the lower appeal reaches me too. I do weep,
over the brass bands. I do choke over the flag appropriately carried.
I do fall in love (if I am careful to shut my eyes) with a good tenor
voice. And while there are, luckily, a great many people like my
husband, there must be millions more like me. He remembers the Gospel
Hymns; but I like them.
Not quite to the trail-hitting point; but then I fancy the hymns of
the tabernacle are less good than they used to be. I do not know the
tune of “Brighten the Corner Where You Are.” Though my six-year-old son
has learned it from the cook, I do not believe he has the tune right.
He cannot have it right: if it were right, there would be no sawdust
trail. Nor do I know the music of “The Brewer’s Big Horses Cannot Roll
Over Me.” But I have a suspicion that Billy Sunday’s hymns are nothing
like so good as Moody and Sankey. The dance music of the day always has
its effect on popular airs of every kind, even religious. I venture to
say (_pace_ the shade of Lord Byron) that the waltz, throughout
the nineteenth century, had a strong religious influence. Every one
knows that good waltz music, if played slowly enough, is the saddest
thing in the world. The emotion aroused by good waltz music well
played is blood-brother to the emotion aroused by “God Be with You Till
We Meet Again” and “For You I Am Praying, I’m Praying for You.” Waltzes
and Gospel Hymns reinforce each other--which is probably why the unco’
guid object to dancing. But with all due allowances for mob-emotion and
the sensual ear, I cannot believe that syncopation serves the Lord.
People’s eyes do not grow dim as they listen to a fox-trot. It does
nothing to bring forth that melting sense of universal love which the
old popular music did. All waltz music was in essence melancholy; and
all sentimental melancholies meet together somewhere in the recesses
of the vulgar heart. Yes: when popular composers were writing good
waltzes, it was easier for the Sankeys and Blisses to write good hymns.
The Y. P. S. C. E. must have had easier work with the young people who
were singing “Marguerite,” than it has now with the young people who
are singing “At the Garbage Gentlemen’s Ball.” I have a notion that the
young people who are singing “At the Garbage Gentlemen’s Ball” do not
go to Y. P. S. C. E. meetings at all. Well, you see, those who sang
“Marguerite” did.
Those who know say that we are growing more vulgar all the time.
Perhaps the difference between D. L. Moody and Billy Sunday is a good
index of that degeneration. Certainly the silly young things who wept
while they sang “God Be with You Till We Meet Again” would not have
pretended to call Christ up on the telephone--or have permitted any one
else to do it in their presence. But, thank Heaven, the conventicles
are like to outlast the tabernacle.
At all events, I am sure of one thing: that my husband will not be
persuaded, twenty years hence, to “oblige” with “The Brewer’s Big
Horses.” But I hope he will continue at intervals to oblige with “Throw
Out the Life-Line.” For, so long as he does, I shall continue to be
evangelized.