Transcription of article in the Bulletin of The Hymn Society of Great Britain and Ireland, Vol.8 No.13, May 1977, Bulletin No.139, pages 221-7. (Copyright, The Hymn Society, reproduced by permission)
"John Greenleaf Whittier: 17 December 1807 - 7 September 1892; New England Quaker"; says one of my handier dictionaries, "he was in his day the most popular poet after Longfellow; his work has been compared with Cowper's". With whose? Ah well: perhaps it shows how far from the real world of literature we hymnologists live.
Some of the first hymns I ever sang were Whittier's because the first hymn book I ever opened was Worship Song and the first preacher I ever sat under was a Welsh liberal who never allowed any other hymn book to be used in the churches he served. Neo-orthodoxy theology at college taught me that he was one of those dreadfully over-educated spiritual speculators, and firmy ordained that `Dear Lord and Father . . . ' was beyond the legitimate pale. Thus far I followed them; but my loyalty was not altogether shaken.
Whittier to modern congregations probably means `Dear Lord and Father' and `O brother man . . . '. Conceivably, when a new church has just gone up, he may mean `All things are thine . . . '. But to me he means, pre-eminently, `Immortal love . . . ', and it is a textual study of that which has led me to think again about him.
For the English, Whittier was discovered by the Congregationalists, who in 1887 put nineteen stanzas of the poem, Our Master, which begins `Immortal love ... ' in their Congregational Church Hymnal, and who, through Garrett Horder, about the same time made known certain selections from two other poems in the same style, My Psalm and The Eternal Goodness. Percy Dearmer included fourteen stanzas of Our Master in the English Hymnal, and the obstinately anti-American A&M recognized him in 1950 by including seven stanzas of that and five of `Dear Lord and Father ... ', both taken without alteration from EH. What other books did we shall see in a moment. But when you come to look at the different selections from these three poems that current books carry, it becomes clear that Whittier, considered as a poet from whose work hymns have been fashioned, is unique. I personally know of no other poet, save only (surprisingly) John Milton, whose work has suffered such radical cento-making; the Milton work I refer to is his 1648 metrical psalm from which that superb piece, `The Lord will come and not be slow' is taken (and this too may have been begun by Congregational enterprise: I have not found it before their hymn book of 1855). But consider how different editors have jumbled the Whittier stanzas: where else has this been done?
I am here mainly considering the three poems, Our Master, The Eternal Goodness and My Psalm. It is the first two of these which have suffered the most `jumbling'. though the Congregationalists have taken their own unusual line with the third. (Our Master in the original has 38 stanzas of CM, The Eternal Goodness 22 and My Psalm 17 of the same metre: total, 77 stanzas of CM. To allow for flexibility of selection the hymns - with one exception - always appear in CM.)
Americans were certainly singing `Immortal love' before the English were; they appear to have taken it up within a few years of its first appearance, and its success probably caused people in later years to ask Whittier to write hymns for special occasions, which of course, in `All things are thine', he did. But nowadays American hymnals pay most attention to `Dear Lord and Father', `O brother man' and `Immortal love', and unhappily the first and last of these are associated in America with detestable tunes.
From a sample of hymnals (15 British and six American) over the past nearly a hundred years we find that there is no agreement on the texts taken from either of the first two poems, and that the Americans never seem to use the third. Everybody agrees that in Our Master, `Immortal love . . .' is a good verse to start out from; and many editors have thought `O Lord and Master ... ' a good start for part II - but some have thought it an equally good finish for part I, and so it often does double duty. Where there is a part III, it is a `free for all'. The Eternal Goodness, a shorter poem, has no fewer than four different beginnings, and it interesting to observe that the American Presbyterians - until the austere Worshipbook (1972) excluded it - took a quite different line from that taken by any other group, American or English, and made a totally different hymn of it.
Now this raises another and more important point. If it is possible to make several quite satisfactory hymns (for the moment we will omit theological concerns) by clipping stanzas out of long poems in this fashion, what does that say about the poems? When one considers the many hymns that have been taken from the non-hymnic poets, one doesn't exactly see this happening. There is George Herbert with his lyrics which are always cut almost exactly to size from the start; and Henry Vaughan, and Crossman (from whose `My song is love unknown' it is a crime to omit a word): there are Pestel and Donne and Tennyson: if editors use this material they may omit a stanza here and there, but they don't rearrange them. Even Dearmer's rather delightful abridgement of Godolphin, in `Lord, when the wise men came', though it omits half the poem, does not rearrange the order of the lines. Perhaps - and this isn't quite a fair comparison - only `O for a thousand tongues' has been subjected to the arranger's treatment in this fashion: and that began with John Wesley, who first turned a poem into a hymn by simply omitting verses, and encouraged later editors to do their own rearranging.
We have to add that even when Whittier's verses are rearranged, it is hardly ever necessary to change even the opening word. `But warm, sweet, tender . . . ' sometimes has its opening conjunction changed, and `Yet in the maddening maze of things' sometimes begins `Here . . . '. `Our Lord, and Master of us all', the original reading, was altered not for syntactical reasons but for the same that gave us `O God, our help . . . '.
One might conclude, anyhow, that the original poems were of a rather loose and casual structure, if a stanza from here and another from there make reasonable sense. This I do not think is the case. All three are very andante in their rhythm; they are contemplative and wistful and leisurely. But they are also argumentative - especially The Eternal Goodness. Now a few people will know a selection from this beginning `Who fathoms the eternal thought?'. That is stanza 4. Here it is contexted by the first three:
- O Friends! with whom my feet have trod
- $$the quiet aisles of prayer,
- glad witness to your zeal for God
- $$and love of man I bear.
- I trace your lines of argument;
- $$your logic linked and strong
- I weigh as one who dreads dissent,
- $$and fears a doubt as wrong.
- But still my human hands are weak
- $$to hold your iron creeds:
- against the words ye bid me speak
- $$my heart within me pleads.
- Who fathoms the Eternal Thought?
- $$Who talks of scheme and plan?
- The Lord is God! He needeth not
- $$the poor device of man.
Ah! Do you not hear him - perhaps now a rather distant voice - the rather distinguished-looking lawyer, business executive, upper Civil Servant, perhaps a man of letters, in a group of Christian friends very gently admitting that theological speech and thought are not for him? That is Whittier: `To worship rightly is to love each other' - Epistle of James passim. Maybe we should see how the poem ends (stanzas 20-22):
- I know not where his islands lift
- $$their fronded palms in air;
- I only know I cannot drift
- $$beyond his love and care.
- O brothers! if my faith is vain,
- $$if hopes like these betray,
- pray for me that my feet may gain
- $$the sure and safer way.
- And thou, O Lord! by whom are seen
- $$thy creatures as they be,
- forgive me if too close I lean
- $$my human heart on thee!
In Our Master there is the same climate. Here are three consecutive stanzas (4-6) of which we know one very well:
- Hush every lip, close every book,
- $$the strife of tongues forbear;
- why forward reach, or backward look,
- $$for love that clasps like air?
- We may not climb the heavenly steeps
- $$to bring the Lord Christ down;
- in vain we search the lowest deeps,
- $$for him no depths can drown.
- Nor holy bread, nor blood of grape,
- $$the lineaments restore
- of him we know in outward shape,
- $$and in the flesh, no more.
Again, a little further on, this happens:
- No fable old, nor mythic lore
- $$nor dream of bards and seers,
- no dead fact stranded on the shore
- $$of the oblivious years; -
- but warm, sweet, tender, even yet
- $$a present help is he;
- and faith has still its Olivet
- $$and love its Galilee.
- The healing of his seamless dress
- $$is by our beds of pain . . .
(stanzas 12-14, italics mine). That lower-case but is, obviously, important; it is one of the conjunctions that the selectors have sometimes had to alter. Or, once again, towards the end (stanzas 35-36):
- We bring no ghastly holocaust,
- $$we pile no graven stone;
- he serves thee best who loveth most
- $$his brothers and thy own.
- Thy litanies, sweet offices
- $$of love and gratitude;
- thy sacramental liturgies,
- $$the joy of doing good.
Well then: is it right to do this with a poet? Not only have we amended the order of his stanzas and omitted much: we have changed his thought. Or have we? Is that exactly what has happened? My own feeling is that the hymn-editors, begining with Horder and his friends, worked on the principle that a hymn is at best when it affirms: that one can't very easily sing a negative. If then there is an argument in a poem which consists of a straight encounter between what the author holds and what he does not hold, can we extract the positive and leave the negative aside?
The editors have largely done that. Dearmer's selections wholly do it. The more generous selections of others sometimes let a little argument through. The second of the following stanzas (33-34) is still occasionally to be found:
- Not thine the bigot's partial plea,
- $$nor thine the zealot's ban;
- thou well canst spare a love of thee
- $$which ends in hate of man.
- Our Friend, our Brother, and our Lord,
- $$what may thy service be? -
- nor name, nor form, nor ritual word,
- $$but simply following thee.
But on the whole editors have taken only the positive elements, and in most of the current selections the singer is not aware of any discontinuity of thought, simply because Whittier, in the whole length of the two poems, is saying two things: `I believe this', `You, I fear, believe that', and the editors have been content with the `I believe' part, which is what hymns require.
Now all this is dangerous doctrine, I suppose, and is the reverse of what we should encourage in editors in handling any case but Whittier's. And I myself should hesitate about the use as hymnody of some of his other work that has become popular. I have mentioned `Dear Lord and Father'. Now here we have the last six stanzas of a longer poem which was written, rather more passionately than those three already considered, to denounce what seems to have been a sort of transcendental meditation associated with the intake of an exotic drug called Soma. The `I believe' point here is in the serenity and sanity of the Christian Faith as Whittier understands it. But what actually comes out, when all the unsingable material is pruned off, is a celebration of a quietism that is quite different from the more robust, and indeed more biblical, material that survives in hymns from Our Master. What biblical material there is in `Dear Lord and Father' is somewhat distorted. Surely there is much less that is objectionable in the Gospel-reminiscences of Our Master than in the notion that our Lord at prayer was always at peace, or the more widely accepted error (encouraged by the King James version) about the `still small voice'.
The other popular piece, `O brother man', is vulnerable from the other direction; its very forceful, though elegantly expressed, denunciation of customary worship, and its placing of this in opposition to the service of human beings, is too badly put to make a good vehicle for congregational praise. This is what has mostly been abridged out of Our Master, but it is the central point of `O brother man'.
No; it is when Whittier is being positive that he is valuable. I would cheerfully trade those two for a revival of his early piece, `Lord, for the things we see', which Horder placed as the last hymn in Worship Song: here is a good thought from it:
- Others shall sing the song,
- others shall right the wrong,
- finish what we begin,
- and all we fail of, win.
- What matter we or they,
- ours or another's day,
- so the right word be said
- and life the sweeter made?
Whittier has, naturally, suffered from the Augustinian theology which the first half of this century made fashionable - and which, we must insist, everybody needed. Looked at from a certain angle, he is over- optimistic, too kind to human nature, too sure that, with a little common sense and forbearance all round, things can soon be straightened out. He did write, and presumably believe, this:
- Yet, sometimes glimpses on my sight,
- through present wrong, the eternal right;
- and, step by step, since time began,
- I see the steady gain of man;
- and Dearmer thought that would do for Songs of Praise (610). It sits wryly now on any Christian tongue in Britain or America.
And yet - he must be a very stern Augustinian indeed who can do without what we know as the hymn `Immortal love'. Even the theologically fastidious American Presbyterian Worshipbook couldn't omit that (though its editors didn't find the energy to look for a better tune). I once used some stanzas from The Eternal Goodness, including `I know not where his islands lift ... ', at the funeral of an old-fashioned romantic missionary who had spent much of her life at sea. And I still meet people, not particularly elderly yet, for who, `When on my day of life' expresses much that they value.
The man was gentle; that is the point. Ah! sneers the radical: he could afford to be. That sneer conditions much of the modern criticism of him. Very well then: he was a New England puritan and spent most of his life as a leisured and professional literary man, and he was no Sydney Carter. But if, as that superb book Christian Maturity and the Theology of Success, by Daniel Jenkins, says, gentleness is one of the virtues of Christian maturity, then, for my money, `Immortal love' amd `O Lord and Master', as the English Hymnal has them, celebrate precisely that. And the wrath of the gentle can be more eloquent than the shrieks of the indignant.
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(The Rejoice & Sing Enchiridion:edited by David Goodall; last amended 23/5/03)