Too often in the euphoria of singing together we don't really think very much about the words. That's regrettable. It's also regrettable that hardly ever do we think about the life of the authors of hymns and why they wrote what they did. My new book, A Joyful Noise, selects 24 - there could have been many more - whom I found interesting and who lived in interesting times - times of crisis in many cases, which shows in what and how they wrote.
For, many of the things we think have always been there have in fact not always been there. For example, how many remember that the Church of England did not allow the singing of hymns in church until 1820? Many favourites come from before that: from the mediaeval Latin tradition, the German Lutheran tradition, and some of course come from the nonconformists - particularly the work of people like the great Isaac Watts.
Details about some of them put flesh on the bones of myth. Ambrose, for example, was a civil servant in Milan, capital of the empire in the late 4th century. He wasn't even baptised when the quarrelling parties in the church agreed that only he could hold them together. He hated the idea, but even though he went into hiding, he was dragged out, literally, forcibly baptised, priested and made bishop all in one week. He proved a very great bishop indeed, who stood up to Emperor Theodosius the Great and had the charisma to rebuke him publicly. But it's often forgotten that when he was bishop, the pagan altars were still smoking, and there was no guarantee that Christianity would remain free from persecution.
A couple of centuries later I think of Venantius Fortunatus, author of two popular Passion hymns, wandering as a strolling minstrel around the courts of Merovingian Europe, before meeting St Radegund, who persuaded him to become a bishop. Then there is the prolific Charles Wesley about whom John worried, when they were together at Oxford. Charles told John that he was 'very desirous of knowledge but can't bear the drudgery of coming at it near so well as you could. ... My head will by no means keep pace with my heart'. And freed of family restraints, Charles' first year was somewhat, well, relaxed: several excursions to London and emotional entanglements with actresses. To John's attempts to make him more serious he objected: 'What? Would you have me to be a saint at once?'
I think too of Isaac Watts, an internationally known scholar and correspondent of Benjamin Franklin, his hymns were often regarded with great disapproval as 'Watts' Whims'. Even as a child he spoke in verse. Once, explaining why his eyes were open during family prayers, he replied, 'A little mouse for want of stairs, ran up a rope to say its prayers.' Another time, when his father was about to punish him for something , he exclaimed, 'O father, do some pity take, And I will no more verses make.' The promise was not kept.
But talking of violence, what about the gentle, scholarly J. M. Neale, the greatest translator of the Latin hymns (who also gave us 'Good King Wenceslas')? He was so hated for his liturgical views that at a funeral in Lewes he was assaulted by a mob, fomented by some prominent citizens, and only escaped lynching because the police bundled him into the King's Head pub. The mob soon gathered round it, and finally, on police advice, he scrambled across gardens and over walls to the railway station.
Two books vastly influenced the hymn tradition: Hymns Ancient and Modern (1861) and the English Hymnal (1906). For the latter – when it appeared the Archbishop of Canterbury banned it - we must thank the remarkable Percy Dearmer, eventually made Canon of Westminster despite his unconventional and socialist views. Dearmer was fed up with the quality of many hymns commonly sung, and persuaded Oxford University Press to commission a collection of good hymns with good music to enhance the beauty of holiness in the yearly liturgical round. A flamboyant man - an extravagance of dress, when an undergraduate, was characteristic - but something of a genius, he chose an almost complete unknown - a jobbing, atheist organist - as music editor of the new hymnal: Ralph Vaughan Williams.
He had style, and clothes are statements. G. K. Chesterton, one of Dearmer's religious protégés, and himself not uncolourful in appearance or language, recalled how Dearmer, out and about on pastoral calls, would wear a cassock topped by a priest's gown, and his square cap (velvet for a Doctor of his University). Chesterton tells how he and Dearmer, walking together and talking passionately as usual, once encountered some street urchins, who called out, "No Popery," or "To hell with the Pope."... Dearmer's response was sternly to confront them with concise historical and ecclesiological facts, concluding, 'Are you aware that this is the precise costume in which Latimer went to the stake?'
I wonder if those boys, surely astonished, were ever made curious to know their heritage. I have tried to acknowledge some of that heritage in my new book.
Charles Moseley is the author of A Joyful Noise: Some authors, their times and their hymns, available now in hardback, priced £16.99.
