Among the best known of Neale’s hymns (from translation) are ‘Ye Choirs of new Jerusalem’, ‘The Day of Resurrection’, ‘Christ is made the sure Foundation’, ‘All glory, laud and honour’, and ‘O what their joy and their glory must be’; while among his own work ‘O happy band of pilgrims’ remains the most widely used.
H. F. Lyte
It would be a foolhardy editor who left out H. F. Lyte’s ‘Abide with me’ from a new hymn book in any part of the English-speaking world. Although written nearly 200 years ago in a pre-modern world, it retains its power to cross every sort of social and cultural frontier and if not at the top of the favourite hymn charts, which it usually is, it is never far below.
In 1927 the organizers of the FA Cup Final decided, with the strong approval of King George V, that ‘Abide with me’ would provide a fitting climax to the community singing that preceded the kick-off. This decision was, obviously, not based on any theological ground but informed by an awareness that this particular hymn had in a unique way entered deeply into the emotional, if not the overtly religious, consciousness of the nation.
This was probably caused by the comforting reassurance offered by its words, and these were perfectly complemented and reinforced by William Henry Monk’s tune ‘Eventide’. Long before the 1927 Cup Final, ‘Abide with me’ had been sung at countless bedsides of the dying and at even more funerals. And in a world frequently devastated by war it was the one hymn known and valued by those serving at the front line or on a sinking ship, or held in a prisoner-of-war camp. The heroine nurse Edith Cavell and an army chaplain sang ‘Abide with me’ together in her cell before she was shot by the Germans in 1915.
The words were inspired by Luke 24.29, where during the evening of the first Easter Day the disciples, accompanied by the incognito Jesus on a journey to Emmaus, invited him to spend the night in their home: ‘Abide with us; for it is toward evening and the day is far spent.’ Its author was only 27 when as a young curate he heard a dying friend repeat the phrase ‘Abide with me’. This led him to compose some verses on this theme which he kept to himself until shortly before his own death in 1847 when he gave the manuscript to a relative who got them published soon afterwards. The original version had three additional verses, 3–5, which were subsequently omitted from most hymn books, not because there was anything amiss with them but, presumably, because they lifted the emphasis from the deathbed to continuing daily life.
Lyte, the son of a naval captain, was born in Scotland in 1793 but soon moved with his family to Ireland. At Trinity College, Dublin, he won poetry prizes in three successive years. He intended to become a doctor, but changed his mind and, following ordination, became curate of a parish near Wexford. Ill-health caused him to resign and he lived for a time in the more hospitable climate of Marazion in Cornwall, where he married the heiress of a rich Irish clergyman.
On recovery of his health he became a curate at Lymington in Hampshire, then at Charlton in Devon, before becoming vicar of the new parish of Lower Brixham, also in Devon, where he remained for 25 years. He was, however, frequently beset by ill-health, requiring many foreign tours, and only two months after his resignation from Brixham he died of tuberculosis in Nice. Aided doubtless by the wealth of his wife, he accumulated a considerable library of theology and Old English poetry which occupied a London auction house for 17 days in the year following his death.
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