The Making of Many Hymn Books - Glenn Conjurske
The Making of Many Hymn Books
by Glenn Conjurske
The longer I live the more deeply I feel the great evil of “the making of many books.” It seems to me a great crime to flood the world with books (and booklets and pamphlets and magazines and “newsletters”) which are shallow, mediocre, and unsound, thus obliging every seeker of wisdom and edification to sort through ten bushels of chaff in order to find one corn of wheat. Even if we had a thousand years to live, or a thousand lives, it would be a pity to have to spend them thus.
But as it is with the making of every other kind of book, so also with the making of hymn books. A few days ago I started to look through a hymn book called The Silver Trumpet, edited by H. L. Gilmour and R. Kelso Carter, and published in 1889 by John J. Hood of Philadelphia. I began to read the Introduction, and met with these words:
“If Solomon could say in his day, ‘of making many books there is no end,’ what would he say if he could come back and stay with us long enough to look over the list of the publications of the present age?
“That we are making many books is especially true in the department of christian song. But the Songsters of Zion are noted for their bigness of heart, and they are ever ready to welcome one more into the number that with melodious songs invite sinners to Jesus, and press believers to penetrate the Beulah land of religious experience.”
Well, yes. We deeply feel the real poverty of the church in this department, and are indeed always more than ready to welcome new hymns, if they are good ones—-but really, we have little heart to welcome another bushel of chaff. The fact is, there is a great moral fault in publishing what is mediocre or worthless. This is doubtless usually the fruit of pride, and it is certainly a failure to comply with the commandment of God. The Bible says, “For I say, through the grace that is given unto me, to every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think soberly, according as God hath dealt to every man the measure of faith.” (Rom. 12:3). “Not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think”—-that is, not to suppose that he has abilities which he has not, not to suppose his performances to be worth publishing, when in fact they are common and mediocre. This scripture not only makes us responsible to thus think soberly concerning our own gifts and abilities, but assumes also that we may be capable of doing so.
Not that I suppose every man actually has this capability. Far from it. If every man both could and would judge objectively concerning his own abilities and performances, the making of many books would abruptly cease, and there would be no occasion for the writing of this article. The church would not then be flooded with unprofitable literature and mediocre hymns. But how do men acquire this ability, to think no more highly of themselves than they ought to think? That question is easier asked than answered. Doubtless by humility. Doubtless by maturity, by depth, by wisdom, and by understanding—-all of which take time to acquire. Meanwhile there is no end to the making of many books, and of many hymns.
From my own very small collection of hymn books, amounting to less than 300 titles, I could compile a hymnal containing 20,000 hymns—-but at least 19,000 of them would be shallow and mediocre at best, in words, or music, or both, and another five or six hundred, though containing poetic worth or musical merit, would also contain doctrinal confusion. And many which are sound are nevertheless cold and dry and empty.
But one of the great evils here is that men and women who were actually gifted of God, and who actually wrote some of the most excellent poetry or music which we now possess, did not have sense enough to repress the mediocre, while they published the excellent. Evidently they had not the grace to think no more highly of themselves than they ought to have thought. They supposed that whatever flowed from their pens or their pianos was worthy of publication. They must publish all, and so flood the church with thousands of hymns which ought never to have seen the light of day. I refer to the writers of some of our best hymns, such as Charles H. Gabriel, Mrs. C. H. Morris, William J. Kirkpatrick, J. Lincoln Hall, and others of their caliber. Persons looking through an ordinary selection of hymns can have no idea how many hymns these writers put to the press. In any ordinary hymn book they will find only a few of the best. But to make that selection of the best, someone had to wade through thousands of another sort. Fanny Crosby alone wrote over eight thousand hymns (words only), a large number of which went to the press. A discerning critic says of her, “It is more to Mrs. Van Alstyne’s credit as a writer that she has occasionally found a pearl than that she has brought to the surface so many oyster shells.”
Observe, “occasionally.” It is scarcely possible for any writer of sacred poetry to do much better than this. Even the great Charles Wesley, who is hardly to be equalled for spiritual fervor and poetic genius, produced a great deal of chaff. Why cannot poets, composers, and authors have sense enough to publish what is worthy, and suppress the rest? Have they no waste baskets? Do not the plain commands of Scripture require this of us? Is it doing all things to edification, to publish the dull and mediocre? Is this not thinking of ourselves more highly than we ought to think? Had I inclination, and time for it, I could doubtless write as many hymns as Fanny Crosby and Charles Wesley wrote—-and music too, which they never attempted—-but it would be a positive sin for me to do so. I have written a few hymns which I have put in print, and given to the church, but I have written others (both words and music) which I have consigned to oblivion without ever committing them to paper. It would have been wrong to do otherwise. They had no merit. Those pieces which I have written which I judge to possess any worth are generally those which I have written with floods of tears. I have one piece in my hands which I wrote twenty years ago, but I have not even included it in my own hymn book. My children sing it, and some others have asked for copies of it. The poetry is good, and the substance solid. The music is suitable, and not unpleasing, though hardly first-rate. Yet I feel that there is something missing in it. It lacks the warmth, the spirit, the unction which a hymn ought to have. Perhaps others might not feel this, but I feel it, and can only explain it by the fact that I wrote it without tears. Whatever the reason, I question whether it is worthy of a place in the hymns of the church, and therefore I have kept it out. In this I believe I am doing no more than God positively requires of me. I have no right (and no desire, by the way) to contribute to the mountain of chaff under which the church groans already.
Now I believe that if Gabriel and Hoffman and Kirkpatrick and Sweney and Fanny Crosby and Mrs. Morris had held the same standards for themselves that I feel bound to hold for myself, most of their productions would never have seen the light of day, and we had at any rate been spared the making of so many hymn books. As the matter stands, for all their writing and printing and publishing and selling, the stock of good hymns in the church has only been increased by a few.
J. C. Ryle wrote, in 1868, “But really good hymns are exceedingly rare. There are only a few men in any age who can write them. You may name hundreds of first-rate preachers for one first-rate writer of hymns. Hundreds of so-called hymns fill up our collections of congregational psalmody, which are really not hymns at all. They are very sound, very scriptural, very proper, very correct, very tolerably rhymed; but they are not real, live, genuine hymns. There is no life about them. At best they are tame, pointless, weak, milk-and-watery. In many cases, if written out straight, without respect of lines, they would make excellent prose. But poetry they are not. It may be a startling assertion to some ears to say that there are not more than two hundred first-rate hymns in the English language; but startling as it may sound, I believe it is true.”
And if there are only a few men in any age who can write first-rate hymns, it is a plain fact that they cannot write one every day, or every week. Those intangible, undefinable qualities which make good poetry —-the life, and power, and freshness, and unction—-these can no more be produced by any mechanical means than they can be judged by a mechanical standard. Such hymns are produced in the crucible, or it may be on the mountaintop. They are wrung from the soul by deep anguish, or flow spontaneously from the soul in times of deep spiritual experience. David’s psalms are mostly of this character, and after all, he wrote but few of them in comparison with many modern writers of hymns. Cleland Boyd McAfee is remembered for only one of the many things which he penned, the hymn “Near to the Heart of God.” His brother’s two little daughters had died of diptheria in one day. Grief was too deep to say anything, yet how could he not? He wrote the words and music of that hymn, taught it to his choir, and took them to sing it by night under the window of his brother’s darkened and quarantined house. It would be impossible to conceive anything more perfectly adapted to the situation. And the music, subdued in tone, is so perfectly adapted to the words that we stand in awe. But observe, McAfee wrote that hymn when a young man, and never wrote another like it—-though he wrote many which were inferior. Such hymns are born in the crucible, and cannot be produced any otherwise.
H. G. Spafford, so far as I know, wrote but one hymn, that excellent piece which is known by everybody—-as indeed it ought to be—-entitled “It is Well with My Soul.” He wrote that hymn upon receiving a telegram informing him that all his children had been lost at sea, his wife alone being saved. This is a real hymn, but this is not the same thing as turning out songs and poems glibly and daily or weekly. Accomplished poets and composers may easily do the latter, but there is more of detriment than of blessing in it for the church of God.
And observe, Ryle’s excellent remarks refer only to the words of the hymns. The hymnals which he published contained no music at all, but words only. It was common in old times to sing the words to whatever tunes would fit, using one tune for numerous hymns, and often the same words to a number of different tunes. The church has (wisely and fortunately, I believe) altered her practice in that, and we must have one tune permanently wedded to each piece of poetry. We must therefore have both good words and good (and suitable) music, wedded together in one piece. This is hard to find, and hard to produce. It is true (fortunately or unfortunately) that good music may lend its own dignity and beauty to the most common of words, but still we must insist that there be more in our hymns than mere fluff, nor can we tolerate doctrinal confusion, no matter how pleasing the sound. On the other hand, it may be that words which are deep and moving may lend a little of their own excellence to mediocre music, but this will not go very far, and as a general rule no hymn can live without good music.
But where are we to get good music? In going through old hymn books, I find it much easier to find acceptable words than acceptable music. This is no doubt just reversed in modern hymn books, but many of the older books are literally filled with dull and mediocre music (to use no stronger terms)—-and most of it written by our well-known composers of sacred song. We do not fault them for not writing better. To write pleasing music is a much more difficult thing than it is to write good poetry. To produce the body of a song is mechanical and easy. To produce a song with a soul is another matter. Anyone can string notes together, but writing music is another thing, and this is an ability which cannot be acquired by any process known to man, nor exercised at will if we have it. Neither study, nor practice, nor experience will help us much here—-though prayer might. The ability is inscrutable, undefinable, and inexplicable—-to me at least.
But what of that? We can all recognize good music when we hear it, and though there is something of individual taste in this, it yet remains a fact that some songs are pleasing to almost everybody, while others are pleasing to almost nobody. Anyone with a little experience and sense can tell the difference. I have gone through the music in scores of hymn books, my wife playing the piano while I listened, and I can positively affirm that a piece of truly good music stands out like a mountain peak among the rest. As unaccountable as this may be—-and it is unaccountable to me—-I have often been able to recognize a truly excellent piece of music after hearing only the first three or four notes. I have held my breath as my wife played on, more than half expecting the initial effect to be spoiled by the rest of the piece, but have been most pleasantly disappointed in that, finding the excellence to be sustained throughout. It is not difficult to recognize good music.
Why then have our best composers published so much music which is dull and mediocre? We do not fault them for not writing better, but we do fault them for publishing the worse. Methinks this is a positive wrong to the church of God. They must make hymn books, and if they cannot write good music for such poetry as they have in hand, they will publish bad. We might readily excuse this—-IF the words were so excellent as really to call for publication. We might then excuse them for printing such music as they could, for the sake of excellent and powerful poetry, but why should they publish dull and mediocre music as the vehicle for dull and trite and shallow words? There is really no excuse for this. I have certain poetry in hand for which I have sat down at the piano and composed music perhaps a hundred times, much of it doubtless as good as plenty which I have seen in hymn books, and yet I never once committed it to paper, for I knew well that it was not good enough. Surely our great composers—-who have written some of our most excellent music—-might have known the same concerning much of the music which they put to paper. But they evidently exercised no carefulness about the matter. Charles H. Gabriel made his scanty living writing hymns, and wrote one song a day! Thus we are left with bushels of chaff, which we must sort through in search of the wheat.
But if it is bad to have our best composers writing too much music, it is worse still to have those who are no composers at all filling sheets of paper with musical notes. We suppose that modern pride, modern affluence, modern technology, and modern education have largely augmented this evil. I may remark here that in music as in most every other sphere, what are called “self-made” men are usually vastly superior to the “educated” variety. Ira D. Sankey was universally acknowledged as the greatest of the gospel singers. Moody’s son-in-law says of him, “Of all the gospel singers I have heard Ira D. Sankey was the greatest, and I have heard them all except P. P. Bliss, who was killed in a railroad accident in 1876. Others have had more polished voices, more musical technique, but even at the age of about 50 Mr. Sankey could capture an audience more quickly with his resonant voice and hold them spell-bound or Spirit-bound more fully than any singer I ever heard.” Yet of the same man we also read, “Mr. Sankey has never studied music under the guidance of any instructor. His hymns have always been sung as naturally as a bird warbles.”
Charles H. Gabriel, whom his fellow-composer E. O. Sellers calls “Composer Pre-eminent,” “had never taken a music lesson in his life.”
There is good reason why such things are so. I pass over the fact that these “self-made men” might generally better be styled “God-made men,” while those of the educated sort are rather “man-made men,” for there is a very proper sense in which “self-made men” are actually “self-made.” They are men whose soul is engaged in the matter, and who therefore press forward with energy and determination through every difficulty to learn what they must in order to do as they would. Such men commonly tower above the educated sort as a grand mountain peak towers above so many hillocks. The educated men are given the mechanics with which to perform the work, while they more often than not have nothing of the soul of the matter throbbing in their veins.
Yet the possession of the bare mechanics of the thing causes them to think of themselves more highly than they ought to think. They aspire to be mountains, when they are but hills. It is a plain fact of life and of history that God makes but few shepherds, and many sheep. But give a mechanical education to those many sheep, and they will all set up to be shepherds. God may make only one leader for thousands of followers—-and in the field of music the proportion of leaders is certainly much smaller than in some other fields. A little mechanical knowledge, however, turns many of the followers into would-be leaders, and the leading which they do is of course poor enough. Hymns and hymn books are multiplied, which are commonplace and mediocre at the best, and which in fact ought never to have existed at all. The plain fact is, at all times, in all places, and under all conditions, to think no more highly of ourselves than we ought to think will for the most of God’s saints mean to be content to be followers, and let God’s leaders lead.
We know how unpopular such doctrine will be in this land where all men are so steeped in democratic principles, and democratic pride besides. Yet “Say I these things as a man? or saith not the law the same also?” (I Cor. 9:8). That very passage of Scripture which is pressed into service to make every man in the church a preacher—-I mean I Corinthians 14—-stands directly against such a notion. It says, “Let the prophets speak, two or three.” There is no “open meeting” here, nor any “open ministry,” but those only speaking who are gifted of God for it, and not many even of them. Yet as Ryle says, “You may name hundreds of first-rate preachers for one first-rate writer of hymns.” What then? Just this: the making of many hymns and many hymn books is a great evil.
And yet the making of many hymn books goes on as glibly as ever, there being “no end” in sight. Nay, modern wealth and modern technology and modern pride have greatly augmented the evil. The facilities for making and printing hymns are greatly increased, while the capacity to judge of their worth is greatly decreased. Therefore no doubt the flood of worthless and positively detrimental music and poetry will continue, till it all goes up in smoke when it is tried by fire before the judgement seat of Christ. Methinks, however, that a great many writers of “psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs” would fare a good deal better in that day if they would send their productions up in smoke long before that day arrives. Well, I must answer for myself, and thou, reader, for thyself. May God give us grace to think no more highly of ourselves, our gifts, and our performances, than we ought to think.
Glenn Conjurske