II Objections to Recognizing Its Literary Character
Due to Narrow Definition of Literature
In spite of these facts that surely entitle the hymn to be considered literature in the most vital sense of the word, there are critics who look upon it with undisguised indifference, if not with scorn. Partly due to an utter lack of sympathy with the use of it, partly to an academic idea of what literature really is, emphasizing form and rhetorical interest, partly because its appeal is emotional and not mainly intellectual, these objectors are blind to the larger interests involved. If there is any truth in the insistence of some literary critics that there are few hymns that are good from a literary point of view, Montgomery’s statement may give a sufficient reason: “Our good poets have seldom been Christians and our good Christians have seldom been good poets.”3
Due to Failure to Realize Limitations of Hymns
A better reason is that such critics have seldom realized the limitations the singing hymn presents to the poet. Milton was a great poet, but he could not condense his ideas sufficiently or give them the needed terse expression. He needed a large canvas, while the successful hymn-writer is confined to a miniature. Even Tennyson, who succeeded in small lyrics, wrote only one hymn and that ill-adapted to actual congregational use.
Palgrave, in the preface to his Treasury of Sacred Songs, compares secular and sacred verse as follows: “Secular verse covers many provinces: manners, incident, love, landscape, the vast sphere of drama—in a word, all the many-colored romance of life. Sacred verse can hardly go beyond one province: to expect masterpieces in one field approximately numerous as those in the secular lyric is unreasonable. Even more unreasonable is it, when of this single province a district only is chosen for censure, and treated as the whole domain. Hymns, well-nigh limited to the functions of prayer and praise, are precisely that region in which a practical aim is naturally, almost inevitably, predominant!”
Some Critics and Their Criticism
Dr. Samuel Johnson’s criticism of hymns may be brushed aside as based on a wrong conception of poetry, which to his mind called not for simplicity, but for something near to that artificiality which he conceived of as art: “Contemplative piety, or the intercourse between God and the human soul, cannot be poetical.”... “The paucity of its topics enforces perpetual repetition, and the sanctity of its matter rejects the ornament of figurative diction.”
In mitigation of the false judgment of the old literary dictator, it may be said that the golden age of English hymnody had not yet arrived.
The later criticism of the hymn by Matthew Arnold represents more fully the attitude of the literary critic in our own day. The practical aspects of life were not ignored by him, but they did not bulk large in his mind. Hence it is not surprising that, while he fully comprehended the wide influence of the hymn, he had little or no sympathy with its spirit and even less with its purpose, so that he could write about it after this fashion: “Hymns, such as I know them, are a sort of composition which I do not at all admire.... I regret their prevalence and popularity among us.” Could anti-religious rationalism go further?
Among more recent critics, Edmund Clarence Stedman speaks of the hymn as “the kind of verse which is, of all, the most common and indispensable.” But Professor Boynton in the Cambridge History of American Literature, gives as much space to “Yankee Doodle” as he does to American Hymnody and refers to its “sentimental ornateness,” “tawdry sentimentalism,” and “banalities of evangelistic song,” unconsciously drawing an unhappy portrait of his own spiritual condition.4
The older criticism of the hymn had at least the merit of thoughtfulness and serious consideration of its value and of its shortcomings.
The hymns that would have satisfied literary critics would have required a spiritual delicacy and refinement, an elegance and artistry of phrase, a vagueness of religious idea devoid of genuine feeling, that would shut them out from use in the workaday world in which we live. To set aside the “good and useful purpose” acknowledged by Matthew Arnold in the consideration of the hymn is to ignore its whole reason for being, and, what is vastly more important, to ignore the deepest needs of the human soul.