In Tuneful Accord. Trevor Beeson

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      Lyte wrote some secular music – ‘On a naval officer’ was set to music by Arthur Sullivan – but most of his work, including some hymns, was first published in Poems Chiefly Religious (1833). The Spirit of the Psalms (1834) provided metrical versions of the psalms for use every Sunday of the year and one of these, ‘Praise, my soul, the King of Heaven’ (Psalm 103), is now hardly less dispensable than ‘Abide with me’. Two others, ‘Pleasant are thy courts above’ (Psalm 84) and ‘God of mercy, God of grace’ (Palms 67), remain popular and indicate that Lyte was not always in a funereal mood.

      J. B. Dykes

      John Bacchus Dykes, the most prolific, as well as the most heavily criticized, of the Oxford Movement’s hymn composers, was Precentor of Durham Cathedral from 1849 to 1862. When he resigned this office in order to become, on the nomination of the dean and chapter, vicar of the ancient parish of St Oswald he retained his minor canonry until the end of his relatively short life in 1876. The Durham choir was better than most, though its ceremonial was slack.

      The bishop at the time was Charles Baring, a wealthy scion of the banking family and a notable church builder, who set himself the formidable task of repairing the Church of England’s scandalous neglect of the rapidly developing North East. In this he was very successful, but, more than any of his episcopal colleagues, he was intolerant of clergy who had been influenced by the Oxford Movement. So, although St Oswald’s embraced most of the city, Baring steadfastly refused to licence any curates to Dykes. Thus, in the context of a bitter conflict with his bishop, which included an unsuccessful appeal to the courts, Dykes struggled to minister to his parish single-handed for 12 years. In the end he was driven to resignation by a serious physical and psychological breakdown.

      Most of his 300 hymns were composed before his pastoral responsibilities had become so demanding. Having heard by chance of the plans for what became Hymns Ancient and Modern, he sent some of his tunes to Dr W. H. Monk the music editor and had seven of them accepted for the first edition (1861). Another 24 were taken into the 1868 supplement and the edition published in 1875 included 56 of his items. His special usefulness to the editor lay in his ability to compose tunes to suit particular words, often on request. But, while this had some advantages, it meant that the music was too closely tied to inferior hymns of cloying sentimentality, narrow subjectivity or gloomy fatalism. One of the specialisms was a hymn with a short final line which he continued to drag out excruciatingly. The overall effect of many of his tunes was to reduce the atmosphere of worship.

      Ralph Vaughan Williams was ruthless in his treatment of Dykes when given responsibility for the music of The English Hymnal (1906). He accepted only six of his tunes into the main book and was driven, only by their popularity, to place another five into an appendix which he called his ‘chamber of horrors’. As late as its 1950 revision, however, Hymns Ancient and Modern retained as many as 30 of his tunes and Erik Routley, probably the severest critic of Victorian hymnody, surprisingly described 20 of these as ‘indispensable to congregations’. Others might restrict this accolade to his generally acknowledged fine tunes to John Henry Newman’s great hymns ‘Lead kindly light’ and ‘Praise to the holiest in the height’ and to the ever popular ‘Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty’, ‘Eternal Father strong to save’ and ‘The King of Love my shepherd is’ (which Vaughan Williams regretted that copyright restrictions prevented him from using in The English Hymnal).

      John Bacchus Dykes was born in Hull in 1823. His grandfather, an enterprising church builder in the town, was Vicar of St John’s Hull, and young John learned from the age of ten to play the organ in his church. While at St Catherine’s College, Cambridge, he founded the university Musical Society and was a popular performer of comic songs. He also came under the influence of the Oxford Movement, abandoning his family’s Evangelical tradition and, having sought Holy Orders, became curate of Malton, near York, in 1847. Two years later he went to Durham Cathedral, but he always said that, even though he had a great love of music, the work of a priest was more important to him. Durham University honoured him with a doctorate of music.

      Hymns Ancient and Modern

      In his valuable Abide with Me: The World of Victorian Hymns (1997), Ian Bradley quotes from an article by Bertram Barnaby in the Guardian (9 April 1977) in which he estimates that between 1873 and 1901 around 400,000 hymns were written. How many of these were Anglican is impossible to tell, but the contributions of Heber, Neale, Lyte and Dykes were substantially augmented by Mrs C. F. Alexander, Sabine Baring-Gould, John Ellerton, F. W. Faber, William Walsham How and John Keble (from his Christian Year poems). A multitude of others, mainly clergymen, added hymns of varying quality, not all of which have remained in use and some of which only briefly saw the light of day.

      By the 1850s it was apparent that the plethora of collections of hymns then circulating needed to be replaced by a single volume in which the dross had been eliminated and hymns of quality provided for the entire Christian year – this last requirement indicating the growing influence of the Oxford Movement. In 1858 two London parish clergymen, William Denton and Francis Murray, both hymn-book compilers, decided while travelling together on the Great Western Railway that the time was right for such a volume. A meeting was convened at St Barnabas, Pimlico, in London, a committee of High Church parish priests formed and over the next two years a huge number of hymns were scrutinized, of which 273 were chosen. Nearly 50 per cent of these were translations from ancient Greek and Latin sources, just over one-third were nineteenth-century creations, and the remainder originated in pre-nineteenth-century England or Germany. Hence the inspired title Hymns Ancient and Modern (1861), which quickly established itself as an essential ingredient of Anglican worship not only in Britain but throughout the English-speaking world.

      No less inspired was the choice of editors. The Revd Sir Henry Williams Baker, Bart., who was entrusted with the words, was for 27 years Vicar of Monkland, near Leominster, and himself a notable hymn writer responsible for ‘The King of Love my Shepherd is’ (Psalm 23), ‘Lord, Thy Word abideth’ and ‘O praise ye the Lord’. William Henry Monk, organist of St Matthias Church, Stoke Newington, and Professor of Vocal Music at King’s College, London, applied the skills employed in the creation of a tune for ‘Abide with me’ to the choice of singable tunes for the other 272. His choices – which involved the commissioning of new tunes where none was already available – were probably more critical than those of the words editor in determining whether or not particular hymns would become popular. It is the measure of his success that so many of the tunes originally attached to the hymns have remained in use for 150 years and in many instances are now inseparable from them.

      The immediate popularity of the book led to the production of a 113-hymn supplement (more than half being published for the first time) in 1868, and further supplements were added in 1889 and 1916. But this led to an overall decline in quality and drastic revisions were needed. This process has continued and the Proprietors (now the Council) of Hymns Ancient and Modern have remained an independent profit-making enterprise.

      It is not easy now to appreciate the extent to which hymn singing entered into the culture of Victorian England. Starting as a novelty, it spread like wildfire not only to the churches but also to schools, public houses and wherever people gathered socially – more significantly to private houses where families and friends gathered round a piano or some other instrument to sing what soon became regarded as ‘old favourites’. Ian Bradley, both an authority on and a stout defender of the Victorian hymn, has described hymns as the folk music of the Victorian age and even gone as far as likening them, perhaps with less justification, to modern soap operas.

      They still stand in need of their defenders since, from the time of The English Hymnal (1906) onwards, they have been subjected to the severest of criticism from professional church musicians – subjectivity, emotionalism, banal verse and unbelievably bad music being the chief charges. That this is true of a significant proportion of the huge output can hardly be denied, but more recently there has been a growing recognition that among the Victorian material that СКАЧАТЬ