The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
All singing from the pale green hymn book
When The English Hymnal first came out in 1906, the Archbishop of Canterbury (Randall Davidson) wanted every parish in his diocese to reject it. On its centenary, the Archbishop of Canterbury (Rowan Williams) wrote a foreword to a book in its celebration. Now he has written a foreword to the new Revised English Hymnal.
Its 1,904 pages, two short of the year of its birth, preserve the sacramental Anglo-Catholic flavour that enraged Davidson. This derived principally from its editor Percy Dearmer, who had promoted, in his
Parson’s Handbook (1899), a guide to church services as he liked to think they had been ordered in the Salisbury of the High Middle Ages. For him, dossals and riddel-posts held off the decadence of the Baroque.
But, as Lord Williams pointed out in 2006, “It is given to few hymn books to be overseen by a composer of the stature of Vaughan Williams,” the music editor Dearmer had recruited. They were both under 40 when the English Hymnal was published.
Randall Davidson did not lack grounds for complaint. One of the hymns (by Vincent Stuckey Stratton Coles, Principal of Pusey House, Oxford, when the book was published) asked Mary the Mother of Jesus to pray for the dead: “For the faithful gone before us, / May the holy Virgin pray.”
The Bishop of Bristol responded: “I cannot reconcile it to my conscience, or to my historical sense, to do less than prohibit a book which would impress upon the Church of England tendencies so dangerous.” Dearmer’s riposte was: “Does the Bishop think we should sing, ‘May the holy Virgin not pray’?”
As a compromise, Oxford University Press published an edition ingeniously omitting five controversial hymns without visible blanks or disturbing the numbering. Few bought the abridged edition. In the new edition, the offending hymn, “Ye who own the faith of Jesus”, remains, marked “Suitable for use in procession”, as it has been used at Dearmer’s old parish of St Mary, Primrose Hill, for more than a century.
Another hymn, by William Blake, made one of the founding committee resign. “To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love” said that God dwells in everyone, Christian or not. It was published in 1906, but not now. Perhaps modern readers trip over Blake’s language: “And all must love the human form, / In heathen, Turk, or Jew; / Where Mercy, Love, and Pity dwell, / There God is dwelling too.”
From the first, The English Hymnal embraced an aesthetic far from the roast Victorian beef of Hymns Ancient & Modern. In a poem by Betjeman about leafy Boars Hill, the pale green cover of The English Hymnal went with William de Morgan’s Arts & Crafts tiles around the grate.
The Revised English Hymnal, with a third more hymns than the 1986 New English Hymnal, aims to be “classically Anglican, doctrinally orthodox, liturgically focused, musically and poetically intelligent, and ecumenically and chronologically diverse”. It follows the Church’s year and sacramental life, with Mass settings and hymns for Eucharistc adoration and in thanksgiving after sacramental confession.
Rowan Williams picks up the words dignum et justum (from the ancient dialogue in the Eucharist expressed in the Book of Common Prayer as: “Let us give thanks unto our Lord God. – It is meet and right so to do”). Good hymns, he says, are part of our calling “to speak truthfully, ‘justly’, about God”.