SOURCE: Marshall, Madeleine Forell and Janet Todd. “Isaac Watts's Divine Delight.” In English Congregational Hymns in the Eighteenth Century, pp. 28-59. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1982.

[In the following essay, Marshall and Todd analyze Watts's creation of the English hymn and its characteristics.]

IN DEFENSE OF HYMNODY

The acceptance of hymns for congregational use, necessary for the establishment of the hymn tradition, depended on a departure from the principle, formulated by Calvin and upheld by the Reformed churches, that Christian song must confine itself to biblical texts, the proper piety of which was guaranteed by divine revelation. Someone had to write hymns that could overcome this resistance. Ideally the champion of hymns would belong to a denomination unbound by church hierarchy, with its need to be persuaded. He would be a man of irreproachable piety, who would speak with authority of the devotional life. And he would be a competent poet, whose taste and opinions lay within the mainstream, eminently uncontroversial. Supplementing these political requirements, and in line with our preliminary definition of the hymn, the father of the English hymn ought probably to be a clergyman or preacher, familiar with the experiences of his people and comfortable in his role as leader and educator. He had to be able to distinguish between his private fears and vision and the public requirements of his call. Finally, hymn singing was sufficiently revolutionary that the originator had to understand precisely what he was doing and why hymns mattered.

Not surprisingly, Isaac Watts met all these requirements. Minister of the prominent Independent Mark Lane meeting, a popular preacher and educator, and known for his personal piety, Watts wrote with the necessary authority. Watts was a skilled poet, and his religious opinions and literary taste are those of his day. He was well equipped and well motivated to fashion and to defend hymns that were acceptable as sensible supplements to congregational life.¹

In the preface to his first collection of poetry, the Horae Lyricae (1706), Watts attempted to define a place for original poetry in Calvinist religious life. Puritan suspicion of the immorality of literature had to be dealt with and, ideally, reconciled to an equally venerable humanistic-puritan enthusiasm for the constructive possibilities of pious poetry. The prefatory essay is an apologia, advocating a religious literature that might compete with immoral, secular poetry. Watts's less lenient colleagues, he reports, held that “all that arises a Degree above Mr. Sternhold is too airy for Worship, and hardly escapes the Sentence of unclean and abominable.”² With the Bible as the great precedent for religious poetry, Watts found it “strange that Persons that have the Bible in their Hands should be led away by thoughtless Prejudices to so wild and rash an Opinion.” The devotional use of the psalms had guaranteed a place for poetry in the lives of all believers; the next challenge was to justify texts unhallowed by the divine revelation that sanctified the Scriptures.

Conforming to Calvinist critical tradition and recalling Sternhold's and Hopkins's strictures against those “ungodly Songes and Ballades, which tende only to the norishing of vyce, and corrupting of Youth,” Watts admitted that, in contemporary practice, “the Vices have been painted like so many Goddesses, the Charms of Wit have been added to Debauchery, and the Temptation heightned where Nature needs the strongest Restraint.” The poet was surely responsible for the effect of his poetry on the souls of his readers, an ethical responsibility he had failed to accept:

Thus almost in vain have the Throne and the Pulpit cry'd Reformation, while the Stage and licentious Poems have waged open War with the pious Design of Church and State. The Press has spread the Poyson far, and scatter'd wide the mortal infection; unthinking Youth have been enticed to Sin beyond the vicious Propensities of Nature, plung'd early into Diseases and Death, and sunk down to Damnation in Multitudes. … How will these Allies of the nether World, the lewd and profane Versifyers stand aghast before the great Judge, when the Blood of many Souls whom they never saw shall be laid to the Charge of their Writings, and be dreadfully requir'd at their Hands? The Reverend Mr. Collier has set this awful Scene before them in just and flaming Colours.

[P. v]

A seemingly strange item in a defense of poetry, such an opinion is not as radical as it may appear: the generally accepted instructive duty of literature has simply been translated from the moral to the religious realm and has been lit with sulphur lamps. The didactic responsibility of the poet, seen through Calvinist eyes, was a life-and-death concern. The poet who was a good teacher would go to heaven, while the poet who neglected his calling and lured his readers into vice would be damned.

The novelty of Watts's view, as we watch it unfold, is that his version of literary morality and religion is attuned to contemporary psychology, which in its historical turn was indebted to the spiritual self-consciousness of the Puritans. The promotion of virtue depended on the poet's capacity to move his reader, to inspire feelings conducive to virtue and piety. This feature is characteristic of the literature not of romance but of sensibility. Religious feeling was good in itself, a hallmark of piety, and good as well as a motive force, encouraging virtuous living.

The new element lightens the poet's heavy burden of responsibility and renders an honest enjoyment of literature legitimate. Indeed, Watts's love of literature rings in the language of his protest against the immorality of contemporary literary practice. Joy in words was not new to religion; good preaching demands verbal wit and a rhetorical ear. The understanding of how imaginative literature might function as a means to a devotional end was, however, distinct from traditional understanding. Virtuous poetry elevated thoughts and inspired piety. Dramatic literature was particularly effective, and Watts delighted in the pious effects of French tragedy: “What a Variety of Divine Scenes are display'd, and pious Passions awaken'd in those Poems? The Martyrdom of Polyeucte, how doth it reign over our Love and Pity, and at the same time animate our Zeal and Devotion!” (p. xii). Love and pity, the accepted audience responses to tragedy, become means to a religious end. Such a transformation of Horatian aesthetics was made possible by an emphasis on religious feelings as both manifestations of and spurs to piety.

Watts suggested in his preface that Christianity contained much unexploited literary ground, promising the developer greater rewards than classical mythology or heroic legend: “The Heaven and the Hell in our Divinity are infinitely more delightful and dreadful than the Childish Figments of a Dog with three Heads, the Buckets of the Belides, the Furies with snaky Hairs, or all the flowry Stories of Elysium” (pp. xiii-xiv). The great poet, “employ'd in dressing the Scenes of Religion in their proper Figures of Majesty, Sweetness and Terror,” could win over the world. Watts's feeling for dramatic effects was a salient characteristic of his hymns, employed to inspire efficacious dread and delight.

The idealized figure of the Christian poet might remind us of Milton, but the contrast between the two figures is more instructive. Milton's epic task, his famous justification of the ways of God, is in the classical, Renaissance tradition. The same cannot be said of Watts, who wanted “to diffuse Vertue, and allure Souls to God.” The new age of Locke, Shaftesbury, and sentimental morality demanded a different approach. Christian heroism was possible in Milton's frame; exemplary sensibility and intelligent piety were the equivalents in Watts's world. That the two men represented very different ages in taste as well is apparent from Watts's failure to appreciate Milton's poetic idiom.³ The worlds of their experience were different. The political and religious crises of the seventeenth century had passed, leaving religious thinkers with the obligation to find new bearings, independent of the larger world stage. Watts's hymns are still in general use, while Milton's far greater achievement is, no doubt unfortunately, consigned to courses in the history of British literature.

In his preface to Hymns and Spiritual Songs (1707), Watts explained the difference between his hymns and the earlier poems of the Horae Lyricae. His explanation of this difference between the two varieties of religious verse recalls the main points of the earlier preface. Verses showing “boldness” or “fancy,” by virtue of their daring, had become odes and had been removed. In these rejected odes, the poet had discovered expressions unsuitable for use by common people of common faith, a judgment betraying the familiar concern about the moral dangers of literary expression.⁴ Given the undeniable presence of boldness and fancy in the hymns, Watts was probably preempting criticism by readers hostile to hymns of modern composition, allaying their fears.⁵

In his preface, Watts constructed a double defense of his hymns that helps us grasp the apologetic task. Calling the hymns “poems” and “odes,” he appealed to the literary reader to excuse his failings as a poet, as his aims had been devotional. In the next breath, he confessed to the pious critic that he had sometimes been lured from his devotional purpose by the attractions of poetry:

If there be any Poems in the Book that are capable of giving Delight to Persons of a more refin'd Taste and polite Education, perhaps they may be found in this Part [the hymns of original composition]; but except they lay aside the Humour of Criticism, and enter into a devout Frame, every Ode here already despairs of pleasing. I confess my self to have been too often tempted away from the more Spiritual Designs I propos'd, by some gay and flowry Expressions that gratify'd the Fancy; the bright Images too often prevail'd above the Fire of Divine Affection; and the Light exceeded the Heat.

[P. lv]

Watts was apparently trying to justify his hymns to two different audiences, the stringent Puritans and the independent literati. But we miss an important feature of his work if we fail to appreciate how genuinely he was torn between the call to retreat from an evil world and the delights of the fancy. In the earlier preface he had shared the moral concern of the more rigorous believers at the same time that he delighted in the literary imagination and its pious possibilities. The conflicting claims of pious austerity and poetry are one manifestation of the double call to both self-denial and “Divine Delight,” to asceticism and to joy, that spurred Watts's interest in writing hymns. He acknowledged that the ascetic view of an otherworldly and austere spirituality was legitimate, yet he knew that poetry depends for its substance, and even more importantly, for any constructive effect, on its tangible, worldly resources, including literary pleasure.

Hymn singing should be pleasant. Hymns “should elevate us to the most delightful and divine Sensations,” helping to “compose our Spirits to Seriousness, and allure us to a sweet Retirement within our selves.” This is an answer, decidedly nonascetic and even self-indulgent, to those Christians, including Watts himself, in his more somber frame of mind, who refuse to delight in piety. Such pious pleasure is close in spirit to the attractions of secular virtue described by moralists contemporary with Watts, including Shaftesbury.

Watts described the method he had used in stimulating the desirable delight:

The most frequent Tempers and Changes of our Spirit, and Conditions of our Life are here copied, and the Breathings of our Piety exprest according to the variety of our Passions, our Love, our Fear, our Hope, our Desire, our Sorrow, our Wonder and our Joy, as they are refin'd into Devotion, and act under the Influence and Conduct of the Blessed Spirit.

[P. liii]

Watts provided poetic expression for familiar states of mind shared by all believers and, as he articulated such feelings, clarified the correct devotional attitude. He took the singers and their feelings by the hand and led them along an instructive pathway. He intended to stimulate righteous Christian sentiment in much the same way that the dramatist stimulated admiration and pity. The desired end of a hymn thus became the education of religious sensibility by means of the supervised refinement of human feeling into devotional response, with the help of the Blessed Spirit. The focus of the hymn is, ultimately, the individual singer and his or her spiritual progress. Humane understanding, clear devotional purpose, and poetic skill were called for. One's personal struggles and visions were relevant only insofar as they were representative and were controlled by didactic purpose.

An intriguing complex of convictions is manifest in the Christian poetic apologia of the combined prefaces. Watts appears to our modern eyes to have been profoundly eclectic, although there is no evidence that he himself felt that his opinions were incompatible with one another. He fervently and eloquently disapproved of “immoral” worldly literature but drew a distinction between such damnable stuff and uplifting, inspiring, righteous poetry. He wrote that the temptations of the fancy were at odds with spiritual design but affirmed the devotional place of seemingly secular passions. This double vision is combined with a distinctly eighteenth-century view of literary moral purpose and affective-didactic method. Readers, or singers, were to be moved toward virtuous understanding, in this case devotional response, by means of the manipulated reactions to affecting scenes. The supposition behind this method was that the individual was intrinsically capable of virtue or piety. He or she had the resources, which only needed focus and cultivation. This confidence in human ameliorability is apparently at odds with the conviction of the worm-like baseness of humankind. The depravity of humanity, an item of Watts's faith, is evidently incompatible with his poetic intent and method.⁶

The pursuit of these aims and deployment of these methods are controlled, in the end, by the more general requirements of the hymn as congregational song. The feelings expressed in the hymns must be the familiar, “frequent Tempers and Changes of our Spirit and Conditions of our Life.” They must be directed by devotional purpose, and they must reach out to the “weaker Christians,” involving them in the process of spiritual development and pious understanding.

Watts's skill as a poet and his understanding of his chosen genre were such that his hymns won acceptance in nonconforming churches of his day, served as models for subsequent generations of hymn writers, and are still sung today. Like all permanent literature, the hymns are a product of literary and religious history, appearing at a moment in that history when conditions permitted them to touch human experience of all time. In this connection, Watts's double allegiance, to an otherworldliness that distrusted fanciful flight and idiosyncratic expression and to the devotional and educational possibilities of hymns as poetry, deserves our particular attention.

INSTRUCTIVE DELIGHT

Watts frequently expressed an appreciation of dramatic literature. While his attitude is perhaps surprising in a Calvinist—the Puritans had closed the theaters in the preceding century and Watts had written of the “open War” between stage and pulpit—the dramatic qualities of his hymns provide an important clue to Watts's hymn method. Like drama, hymns are a public genre, dependent for their survival on their broad appeal. They must reach out to capture the attention and involve the interest of the audience-congregation. Like drama, they depend on extraliterary factors, including music. The suitability of religious verse as congregational song and the stage-worthiness of a play are both determined by the author's mastery of his audience and his resources. Watts's special place as innovator in the history of the hymn and his dramatic bent seem to be related: in later years, after hymns were accepted by everybody as a matter of course, adherence to these requirements seems to have become less important.⁷

The entertainment provided by the hymns (as well as by sermons and stained glass windows) is one aspect of “Divine Delight” and at the same time a practical matter of holding audience attention while the verse drives home its point. Visual clarity as an essential means to a didactic end is illustrated by Watts's hymn describing God the Thunderer:

His Nostrils breathe out fiery Streams,
          And from his awful Tongue
A Sovereign Voice divides the Flames,
          And Thunder roars along.

[“LXII,” 3]

The draconic heat and noise of God are startling, vaguely pagan. We are brought in close to the enormous divine nostrils and tongue, while the overwhelming fire and thunder impress us with the scale, power, and motion of the vision of God. Description like this provided a kind of entertainment, certainly, while it stocked the minds of the singers with memorable pictures. The instructive vision is of an anthropomorphic deity of tremendous, fearsome power, to whom we must respond with awe, the desirable devotional end of this particular stanza.

While the prefaces may prepare the reader for somewhat tedious hymns, sentimental in the pejorative sense, in fact, the double obligation of the poet to instruct and delight his singers led Watts to write with great daring: the vital, salvific importance of the good passions demanded poetry that played upon them.⁸ Certainly this inclination to visualize and even to perform the matter of faith was not unprecedented, either in Catholic or in Protestant tradition, and the biblical history of humanity from Creation to Last Judgment had been dramatic enough to provoke the rebirth of Western drama within the church. Watts's dramatic imagination operated similarly. The Puritan objection to images of God is defied in the best interest of devotional inspiration.

Watts's inclination to paint little scenes and to create little plays may be demonstrated in his handling of three categories of subject matter: (1) necessarily visionary description of God and heavenly affairs; (2) Bible stories; and (3) aspects of Christian experience in this world. Overlap is inevitable, but certain features of each kind are distinguishable, and each has its own challenges for the hymn writer. These religious entertainments all include emotional responses, written into the scenes, in keeping with Watts's devotional-didactic aims. The presence of these exemplary responses points to the most important difference between conventional theatrical entertainment and the hymn counterpart. The singers of hymns play the roles for their own delight and edification. They describe the setting, recite the lines, and respond feelingly, all at once, learning each step of the way. This variety of experimental theater is illustrated in the visionary hymn “XCI,” in which the heavenly curtain rises on an enormous tableau of the glorified Christ:

1 O the Delights, the heavenly Joys,
          The Glories of the Place
          Where Jesus sheds the brightest Beams
          Of his O'er-flowing Grace!
2 Sweet Majesty and awful Love
          Sit smiling on his Brow,
          And all the glorious Ranks above
          At humble Distance bow.
3 Princes to his Imperial Name
          Bend their bright Scepters down,
          Dominions, Thrones, and Powers rejoyce
          To see him wear the Crown.
4 Archangels sound his lofty Praise
          Thro' every heavenly Street,
          And lay their highest Honours down
          Submissive at his Feet.
5 Those soft, those blessed Feet of his
          That once rude Iron tore,
          High on a Throne of Light they stand,
          And all the Saints adore.
6 His Head, the dear Majestick Head
          That cruel Thorns did wound,
          See what Immortal Glories shine,
          And circle it around.

The hymn begins with a quite unextraordinary exclamation of how wonderful heaven is, followed by an indecipherable if suggestive image of beams of light being shed and overflowing Grace. Watts's starting point, in theory and practice, is the commonplace perception of the believer. He proceeds to expand and refine this vague idea, leading the spiritual way. To this end, in this hymn, he details an impressive vision of imperial ranks and all the saints, bowing before the glorified Christ. The tableau is not cold or austere; we are not meant to remain distanced or indifferent. Our response is implicit in the scene painting, a combination of awe and kindly love, summarized in the rhetorical effect of “Sweet majesty and awful Love,” as we are both lovingly drawn and respectfully put off by what we see. The double response is sustained as stanzas 3 and 4 awe us with the majesty of the important worshipers, all humbled before Jesus, and then as 5 and 6 detail, at close range, the wounds of Jesus and our feeling response to their softness and dearness. The descriptive achievement is such that by the sixth stanza the singers claim to “See” the vision together, having presumably come to understand, by means of the poetry, both Christ's glory and Christ's accessibility.

The collective-expressive starting point of Watts's hymns and his use of dramatic description for his devotional purpose are further demonstrated in hymn “XXVI.” While universally problematic, the distant inaccessibility of God was a particular challenge of the rational deism of Watts's day. Accordingly, we begin this hymn by articulating our common sense of inferiority and distance from God:

1 Lord, we are blind, we Mortals blind,
          We can't behold thy bright Abode;
          O 'tis beyond a Creature-Mind,
          To glance a Thought half way to God.

Despite this common blindness and human mental disability, Watts proceeds, stanza by stanza, to spread before his singers a memorable vision of God as kind and concerned and as imaginatively visible in human form, sitting on a throne, walking on feet, looking with eyes. Our thoughts do indeed glance more than halfway to God:

2 Infinite Leagues beyond the Sky
          The Great Eternal reigns alone,
          Where neither Wings nor Souls can fly,
          Nor Angels climb the topless Throne.
3 The Lord of Glory builds his Seat
          Of Gems insufferably bright,
          And lays beneath his sacred Feet
          Substantial Beams of gloomy Night.

The devotional process of this hymn consists of imaginatively transcending the singers' inability to see (blindness and vision taken as the central metaphors of the hymn), by means of a detailed vision of God in heaven. The memorable spectacle of the blinding brilliance of the throne and the substantial beams of gloomy Night, trodden down, bent back by a terrific weight, once more shows the seamless joining of visual appeal and devotional lesson. The last stanza summarizes our transformed response:

4 Yet, glorious Lord, thy gracious Eyes
          Look thro', and chear us from above;
          Beyond our Praise thy Grandeur flies,
          Yet we adore, and yet we love.

Distance and blindness have been overcome by both new poetic vision and divine concern.⁹

The second dramatic type, hymns portraying events of biblical record, is most common in the first book of Hymns and Spiritual Songs, which claims to paraphrase the Scriptures. (Many “hymns of original composition” as well as hymns for communion use are also biblical.) Watts took great liberties in his adaptations of Bible text to hymn purpose. The first hymn of book III is a dramatically heightened description of the Last Supper:

1 'Twas on that dark, that doleful Night
          When Powers of Earth and Hell arose
          Against the Son of God's Delight,
          And Friends betray'd him to his Foes:
2 Before the mournful Scene began
          He took the Bread, and blest, and brake:
          What Love thro' all his Actions ran!
          What wond'rous Words of Grace he spake!

Calling the betrayal a “mournful Scene,” Watts indicated just how consciously he saw the Gospel in visual-dramatic units. He has heightened the effects, the dark night and the risen powers of earth and hell, for his purpose. The dramatization is broken by exclamations defining the singers' appropriate reaction, in this case wonder at Christ's love in action and grace in word.

In his pursuit of affective impact, Watts did not stop with the descriptive heightening of atmosphere. He put words in the Lord's mouth, going well beyond the simple rebellion against Calvin's insistence that congregational song come from Scripture. Watts's commitment to the evangelical place of hymns took precedence, and he daringly wrote new words for Jesus:

7 “Justice unsheath'd its fiery Sword,
                    And plung'd it in my Heart:
          Infinite Pangs for you I bore,
                    And most tormenting Smart.
8 “When Hell and all its spiteful Powers
                    Stood dreadful in my Way,
          To rescue those dear Lives of yours
                    I gave my own away.
9 “But while I bled, and groan'd and dy'd,
                    I ruin'd Satan's Throne,
          High on my Cross I hung, and spy'd
                    The Monster tumbling down.”

[III, “XXI”]

This long speech is like a dramatic monologue or operatic recitative. Such sustained discourse strikes us as certainly unsuitable for normal congregational singing unless, in the practice of lining out, when the clerk's voice introduced each line, the incongruity was overcome. The sketch includes the fearful personifications of Justice, Hell, and the Monster and a Christ who is inclined to dwell rather oppressively on his discomforts. The violent activity of these three stanzas is conveyed in the verbs: unsheathe, plunge, bear, torment, rescue, bleed, groan, die, ruin, hang, tumble. Jesus has become the narrator-hero of a fast-moving adventure story, a story designed to drive home the implications of the Passion.

Watts's hymn version of the creation of humanity is similarly dynamic. The poet's imaginative amplification of the Bible text and the commands of the Creator show his familiarity with the discovery of the circulatory system:

He spoke, and strait our Hearts and Brains
          In all their Motions rose;
Let Blood, said he, flow round the Veins,
          And round the Veins it flows.

[“XIX,” 5]

The tangible, visible, and audible qualities of such a creation are as remarkable as the fact that Watts dared to write a script for God. The achievement anticipates Hollywood's biblical spectaculars.

After the divine visionary hymns and the Bible story hymns, the third dramatic category is Christian experience in this world, a subject that seems to suit Watts's stated method best. Common experience is more easily manipulated for devotional stimulus than are heavenly visions or Bible stories, particularly since the Bible's narratives are virtually unsurpassable as literature. Indeed, the drama of the Christian life in and after this world had prompted the development of the morality plays in the Middle Ages.

In hymn “LII” a scene within a scene unfolds. The initial observation is common enough: the godless are in trouble when they die. The dramatic sketch begins with the female personification of the soul, evicted from this life. Her vain appeal, her chains, and the coming misery as one of the damned are the stuff of pathetic tragedy, transmuted by design to inspire our devotion.

1 Death! 'Tis a melancholy Day
          To those that have no God,
When the poor Soul is forc'd away
          To seek her last Abode.
2 In vain to Heaven she lifts her Eyes,
          But Guilt, a heavy Chain,
Still drags her downward from the Skies
          To Darkness, Fire, and Pain.

This little scene inspires the singers to ask all hell-bound sinners to mourn their dire situation and to contemplate the pit, which ghastly view leads the saved to sing:

3 Awake and mourn ye Heirs of Hell,
          Let stubborn Sinners fear,
You must be driv'n from Earth, and dwell
          A long For-ever there.
4 See how the Pit gapes wide for you,
          And flashes in your Face,
And thou, my Soul, look downwards too,
          And sing recovering Grace.

The complex and shifting address of this hymn reflects its multiple purpose as the singer exclaims, narrates, exhorts the hell-bound sinners, and finally speaks to himself or herself. We are encouraged to respond with pity, horror, superiority, worry, and grateful security. In the context of this life-and-death drama, the doctrine of the elect is explicated.¹⁰

The deathbed was the dramatic climax of the Christian's life on earth and a useful object of contemplation for those awaiting the day. Watts acknowledged our natural resistance to such morbid thoughts as he gently called our attention to his subject:

1 Stoop down, my Thoughts, that use to rise,
          Converse a while with Death:
Think how a gasping Mortal lies,
          And pants away his Breath.
2 His quiv'ring Lip hangs feebly down,
          His Pulses faint and few,
Then speechless with a doleful Groan
          He bids the World adieu.

[“XXVIII”]

Death is acted out in a familiar deathbed scene by a representative mortal, whose lips, pulse, and groan we see, feel, and hear. In the interest of our devotion, our concentration on our own mortality, death is put before us naturalistically.

While such specific, very real Death is everpresent (“The Moment when our Lives begin / We all begin to die” [“LVIII”]), so are the comforting qualities, and the figures of Mercy, Love, Goodness, and Grace arrange themselves in a memorable tableau of the divine attributes:

5 'Tis Sovereign Mercy finds us Food,
          And we are cloath'd with Love:
While Grace stands pointing out the Road,
          That leads our Souls above.
6 His Goodness runs an endless Round;
          All Glory to the Lord:
His Mercy never knows a Bound;
          And be his Name ador'd.

The echo of Spenser and the morality plays is as remarkable as the anticipation of Blake. Traditional personifications, like traditional contemplation of the deathbed, suited Watts's poetic purpose.

The contrast between present pain and future delight, necessary and instructive to the suffering believer, is the substance of the famous hymn “A Prospect of Heaven makes Death easy” (“LXVI”):

1 There is a Land of pure Delight
          Where Saints Immortal reign;
Infinite Day excludes the Night,
          And Pleasures banish Pain.
2 There everlasting Spring abides,
          And never-withering Flowers:
Death like a narrow Sea divides
          This Heav'nly Land from ours.
3 Sweet Fields beyond the swelling Flood
          Stand drest in living Green:
So to the Jews Old Canaan stood,
          While Jordan roll'd between.
4 But timorous Mortals start and shrink
          To cross the narrow Sea,
And linger shivering on the Brink,
          And fear to lanch away.
5 O could we make our Doubts remove,
          These gloomy Doubts that rise,
And see the Canaan that we love,
          With unbeclouded Eyes.
6 Could we but climb where Moses stood,
          And view the Landskip o're,
Not Jordan's Stream, nor Death's cold Flood,
          Should fright us from the Shore.

The hymn develops in the established pattern. The first two lines voice our common, nonspecific understanding of heaven. The following four lines detail heaven, contrasting heavenly pleasure, springtime, and absence of decay with their familiar earthly shadows. Stanza 3 introduces the parallel of the Promised Land. The descriptive stage thus set, in stanza 4 we view a crowd of shivering people, deathly afraid. In stanzas 5 and 6 we have become those mortals, our vision obscured because we lack Moses' perspective. Drawing on the familiar Old Testament story, Watts has used descriptive and dramatic resources to move his singers toward an understanding of life in its eternal context. The message is familiar; the formulation is new—a function of the demands of the hymn genre to begin with common feeling or perception, to entertain, and to teach.

Almost every Watts hymn contains a little dramatic scene or the sketch for a religious painting. The devil's methods are demonstrated in “CLVI,” perhaps inadvertently demonstrating those temptations of fancy that Watts acknowledged had threatened him as well:

1 I hate the Tempter and his Charms,
          I hate his flatt'ring Breath;
The Serpent takes a thousand Forms
          To cheat our Souls to Death.
2 He feeds our Hopes with airy Dreams,
          Or kills with slavish Fear;
And holds us still in wide Extreams,
          Presumption, or Despair.
3 Now he perswades, how easy 'tis
          To walk the Road to Heav'n;
Anon he swells our Sins, and crys,
          They cannot be forgiv'n:
4 He bids young Sinners, Yet forbear
          To think of God or Death;
For Prayer and Devotion are
          But melancholy Breath.
5 He tells the Aged, They must die,
          And 'tis too late to pray;
In vain for Mercy now they cry,
          For they have lost their Day.
6 Thus He supports his cruel Throne
          By Mischief and Deceit;
And drags the Sons of Adam down
          To Darkness and the Pit.
7 Almighty God, cut short his Power,
          Let him in Darkness dwell:
And, that he vex the Earth no more,
          Confine him down to Hell.

The hatred of the first line is simple enough as a starting position, followed by seven lines summarizing satanic methods. Stanzas 3 through 5 then require the singers to speak the Tempter's lines, playing an apparently odd part in their own dramatic lesson. The recitation of satanic arguments is instructive, but given Watts's usual control of dramatic effects, it is likely that he intended much more. The general hatred of the Tempter is transformed into a more thorough repulsion by these dramatic means. The satanic lines, which are really supremely unsuitable for church song, are meant to revolt the singers. They are indeed more gripping than the generalizations of the opening stanzas. Watts designed these three stanzas as a lively demonstration of the dangers at hand: thus Satan manages to deceive. We are collectively relieved when the Almighty God's power is finally manifest in the last stanza.

By his own account and as seen in the hymns, Watts's ability to dramatize and visualize his material was always subordinated to the cause of devotional education. In the dramatic hymns his pattern was to orient the singers in the opening lines by articulating the simplest truth, then to build a hymn that broadened the singers' consciousness and explored the implications of that truth, often by means of vignettes of heaven, biblical events, or familiar experiences. While the homiletic model is apparent, the hymn was not a sermon, with an authoritative exposition to be passively heeded, but a participatory poetic genre. The people were to sing the description, the complaints of Jesus, God's lines at the Creation, and the Tempter's lies. As poetry, the hymns employ linguistic coloring and metaphorical suggestion that help us to appreciate Watts's poetic resources and his public's taste. As participatory literature, they are filled with indicators of the response to his subjects that Watts felt to be right and natural. Identification of these devotional responsive goals aids us in our effort to clarify the religious world view of Watts and the place of the hymns within it.¹¹

DEVOTIONAL RESPONSE

The verse pictures of Watts's hymns are frequently violent, bloody, and contorted in the manner of Paul Gerhardt. While the presence of such strong visual elements is indisputable, these hymns distinguish themselves from their Pietist counterparts and from seventeenth-century English prototypes by their greater degree of affective self-consciousness. The envisioned torments press the singers toward a personal melting, partly mystical, partly the manifestation of extreme sensibility. The best example of this distinctive use of traditional imagery is Watts's most popular hymn:

1 When I survey the wond'rous Cross
          On which the Prince of Glory dy'd,
          My richest Gain I count but Loss,
          And pour Contempt on all my Pride.
2 Forbid it, Lord, that I should boast
          Save in the Death of Christ my God;
          All the vain things that charm me most,
          I sacrifice them to his Blood.
3 See from his Head, his Hands, his Feet,
          Sorrow and Love flow mingled down;
          Did e're such Love and Sorrow meet?
          Or Thorns compose so rich a Crown?
4 His dying Crimson like a Robe
          Spreads o're his Body on the Tree,
          Then am I dead to all the Globe,
          And all the Globe is dead to me.
5 Were the whole Realm of Nature mine,
          That were a Present far to small;
          Love so amazing, so divine
          Demands my Soul, my Life, my All.

[III, “VII”]

The subject of this hymn is established in the first stanza as the moral effect on the singer of viewing the cross. In the exemplary response, possessions and pride are reduced by the cross to mere loss and contempt. The reordering of the viewer-singer's values is continued in the sacrifice of vanities to the sacrificed blood. After this careful preparation for the actual Crucifixion, the curtain rises in the fourth and fifth stanzas on a fine example of Watts's descriptive drama in which the physical violence of the Crucifixion is heightened and exaggerated by the use of strong metaphor.

One might be inclined to argue that the flowing wounds in the third stanza and the robe of crimson in the fourth are not meant to be visualized, that they are conventional Christian images, not intended to startle or to bother the mind's eye. The injunction to “See” and the vividly pictorial quality of Watts's other hymns indicate the contrary. Any dilution of the power of the imagery results not from its conventionality but rather from the author's call to intersperse devotional instruction to the singers. In stanza 3, for example, the rhetorical questions hone the singers' feelings rather than clarifying the vision of the cross, while in stanza 4 the stress falls on our death to the world rather than on the bloody death of Jesus.

Obvious seventeenth-century influences aside, the calculated effects of many of Watts's hymns seem to proceed from a new variety of spiritual stress. The disparity between sinners and their heavenly context, between our nature as depraved worms and the distant realms of glory, is extremely difficult to handle, devotionally or theologically. In “XXVI,” which began “Lord we are blind,” God was “the Great Eternal,” reigning alone, “Infinite Leagues beyond the Sky,” a deistic God, not an involved, possibly wrathful Father. This distant abstractness is further described in hymn “LXVII” and is contrasted with an exclamation about our human depravity. The absolute contrast affects the image of the following two lines, and we envision a collection of ignoble animals, bowing before and offering their praises to, a faraway deity:

Great God, how Infinite art Thou!
          What worthless Worms are we!
Let the whole Race of Creatures bow,
          And pay their Praise to thee.

In stanza 5, the contrast between the human and the divine is expanded:

Our Lives thro' various Scenes are drawn,
          And vex'd with trifling Cares;
While thine Eternal Thought moves on
          Thine undisturb'd Affairs.

Our little human world of transitory pretend experience and inconsequential problems is as nothing to God. The suggestion of divine indifference is unavoidable.

Professor Wellek has suggested that the tension between Counter Reformation otherworldliness and Renaissance spirit produced typical baroque literature.¹² We seem to have located a later, parallel tension, in which a similar literary stress derives from the combination of an enlightened, philosophically glorious prime mover and a depraved, wormlike humanity. The two pictures, one of an indifferent, removed divinity, the other of a guilty and vile mankind, are not basically compatible. The god of the deists was the god of “reasonable” people, who found the world as they experienced it an orderly and pleasant place, or at least capable of improvement. The god of the Calvinists was traditionally anthropomorphic, capable of love and wrath and selectivity. Watts's use of strong description indicates that one way to force contact between the distant god and bestial man was by violent metaphor. The Christian can triumph over flesh and sense and “find” God only by focusing on the fleshly and physical nature of the Passion. This becomes an exaggerated emphasis on the very orthodox turn to Christ as mediator between God and man, the incarnation bridging the abyss between divine expectations and sinful human nature. The physical reality of flesh and blood, pain and death, even taken to violent and morbid extremes, jolts the singers by physical means into spiritual awareness and feeling response.

The “dear Flesh” of Jesus left “a long Perfume” in the Tomb (“III”). The blood imagery of the Bible is exploded as we are over and again “bath'd in blood” from the “open'd Veins” of Christ. The redeeming blood becomes a sea in which we drown (“LXXXV”). One's heart is a rock, in a crimson sea, a “Bath of Blood Divine” (“XCVIII”). The wounds of Christ are the source of a healing fountain, “springing from the Veins of Jesus” (III, “XXII”). The exaggerated bloodiness, the concentration on death and dying, and the images of the depraved nature of humanity combine in the Communion hymns, when “Th' Eternal God comes down and bleeds / To nourish dying Worms” (III, “XVII”). Watts's dramatic and visual method forces us to picture the scene, and we join in the banquet, at which we consume “dainties” and eat good food.

The devouring of sacred flesh becomes grotesque as the paradox of Jesus as both host and meat is explored:

1 Jesus, we bow before thy Feet,
          Thy Table is divinely stor'd:
          Thy Sacred Flesh our Souls have eat,
          'Tis living Bread; we thank thee, Lord!
2 And here we drink our Saviour's Blood,
          We thank thee, Lord, 'tis generous Wine;
          Mingled with Love the Fountain flow'd
          From that dear bleeding Heart of thine.
3 On Earth is no such Sweetness found,
          For the Lamb's Flesh is heav'nly Food;
          In vain we search the Globe around
          For Bread so fine or Wine so good.
4 Carnal Provisions can at best
          But cheer the Heart or warm the Head,
          But the rich Cordial that we taste
          Gives Life Eternal to the Dead.
5 Joy to the Master of the Feast,
          His Name our Souls for ever bless:
          To God the King and God the Priest
          A loud Hosanna round the Place.

[III, “XVIII”]

The communicant speaks like a gourmand, pleased with the exceptional fare. But the bread is the flesh (not the body, which would be less disturbing) of the master of the feast, to whom the hymn is addressed, and the wine has come gushing from his heart (and a fountain of blood is a violent picture indeed). The startling combination of the sacramental imagery of living bread and realistic reference to everyday dining reveals Watts's method in one of its most extreme forms. While the poetic means are radical, the didactic yield is perfectly unextraordinary.

Violent imagery was one way of forcing together godly and worldly experience, of bringing sedate, conventional metaphors to devotional life. An alternative solution to the problem, one more generally sanctioned in both Christian and other religious tradition, is ascetic withdrawal from the concerns of this world. The implication of this approach is that we can in fact purify ourselves by disengagement from mundane preoccupations; the world is contaminated, but we ourselves are salvageable. Collective humanity is depraved, but private piety is attainable as an individual, interior achievement. We are not called to particular charitable works or to neighborly concern. We must rather tune out all the noise of earth that drowns out the voice of the spirit. Watts helps us to cultivate such asceticism with his hymns:

1 My God, permit me not to be
          A Stranger to my Self and Thee;
          Amidst a thousand Thoughts I rove
          Forgetful of my highest Love.
2 Why should my Passions mix with Earth,
          And thus debase my heavenly Birth?
          Why should I cleave to things below,
          And let my God, my Saviour go?
3 Call me away from Flesh and Sense,
          One Sovereign Word can draw me thence;
          I would obey the Voice Divine,
          And all inferiour Joys resign.
4 Be Earth with all her Scenes withdrawn,
          Let Noise and Vanity be gone;
          In secret Silence of the Mind
          My Heav'n, and there my God I find.

[“CXXII”]

The private focus is generalized by virtue of its collective expression, and the singers practice parallel inward turnings. This heaven and the God of the secret silence of the mind is one solution to the problem of locating God and relating him to human life, a solution with implications for our understanding of devotional attitude in Watts's other hymns.

Watts's use of personal, familiar, human experience and casual language is characteristic of both the “violent” hymns and the more ascetic hymns. In the former, the dramatic subject is not framed or distanced but rather intermingles with the everyday experiences, like dining, of the reader or the congregation. In the ascetic hymns, the pleasures and pains of common life are recalled for purposes of comparison and contrast. In a homely medical simile, the wretched cravings of earthly life are compared to feverish insomnia and thirst:

1 Man has a Soul of vast Desires,
          He burns within with restless Fires,
          Tost to and fro his Passions fly
          From Vanity to Vanity.
2 In vain on Earth we hope to find
          Some solid Good to fill the Mind,
          We try new Pleasures, but we feel
          The inward Thirst and Torment still.
3 So when a raging Fever burns
          We shift from side to side by turns,
          And 'tis a poor Relief we gain
          To change the Place but keep the Pain.
4 Great God, subdue this vicious Thirst,
          This Love to Vanity and Dust;
          Cure the vile Fever of the Mind,
          And feed our Souls with Joys refin'd.

[“CXLVI”]

Our fevered passions, which are natural to the soul, are a mortal illness that cannot be relieved except by divine intercession as it subdues our love of worldly things and satisfies us with more suitably refined joys. As the reference to ordinary experience enhanced the physical effects of the more grotesque hymns, so the simile of the third stanza enlivens this hymn. The feverish thrashing works well, even serving to disguise the extreme asceticism that Watts is proposing. (Earthly life is described in hellish terms of unquenchable thirst and interminable torment, while the ideal is indifference to all mortal attachments.)

In hymn “XLVIII,” the ascetic solution is again offered, this time in spite of the seemingly good and beautiful things of this world:

1 How vain are all things here below.
          How false, and yet how fair!
Each Pleasure hath its Poison too,
          And every Sweet a Snare.
2 The brightest Things below the Sky
          Give but a flattering Light;
We should suspect some Danger nigh
          Where we possess Delight.
3 Our dearest Joys, and nearest Friends,
          The Partners of our Blood,
How they divide our wavering Minds,
          And leave but half for God.
4 The Fondness of a Creatures Love,
          How strong it strikes the Sense!
Thither the warm Affections move,
          Nor can we call 'em thence.
5 Dear Saviour, let thy Beauties be
          My Souls Eternal Food;
And Grace command my Heart away
          From all created Good.

We are unable to alienate our affections from created Good except by the Grace of God. Watts movingly recalls our seemingly virtuous pleasures and human loves only to have us condemn them all as ungodly. Divine delight may proceed only from contemplation of the beauties of the Savior.

If the responses written into the hymns are indeed exemplary, spiritual delight is a total emotional experience, sensibility rampant. The affected believers melt in sighs and tears; they groan or they pant and dissolve. Sometimes the goal is a quasi-erotic ecstasy, sometimes quiet withdrawal. No call to action, except to sing praises to God, ever intrudes. One may honestly question the appropriateness of the more orgiastic hymns for congregational use. (Watts himself had maintained that hymns must be restrained by the limitations of the common believer.) The emotional state of the contrite Christian is described in hymn “CVI,” which begins:

O if my Soul was form'd for Woe,
          How would I vent my Sighs!
Repentance should like Rivers flow
          From both my streaming Eyes.

We may recall Crashaw's excessive Weeper. While the first line accounts for the implausibility of such extremity, the image of profound distress holds.

In “XXXVII” Jesus transforms the pained cries, sighs, and groans of the believer into something pleasantly miserable:

Jesus alone shall bear my Crys
          Up to his Father's Throne,
He (dearest Lord) perfumes my Sighs,
          And sweetens every Groan.

[St. 5]

The transformation suggests the ecstatic enjoyment and perfect acceptability of total woe. Sighs and groans have a spiritual place, no doubt, and we find comfort in our faith, but when the outcries are cultivated in this manner, they become ends in themselves, essential to a devotional life that depends on raw sensibility for its stimulus.

The subtle relationship between this indulgence in sensibility and Watts's asceticism is important for our grasp of both the substance and the method of his hymns. We have noted that his eighteenth-century version of asceticism was an effort to span the gulf between a distant god and depraved humankind. The possibility of traditional retreat from this world had been lost as Protestantism rejected the monastic ideal. Moreover, the suppression of passion, except for ecstatic moments, that belonged to traditional retreat, was no longer viable, and certainly it was impractical for Calvinist London burghers and their families. Watts proposed an alternative retreat from the world, into the self, where we find the God and heaven of the mind. Our feelings then become the raw material of faith, and their expression in song a useful exercise toward growth in faith. Differently formulated, our sinful state, cut off as we are from God, is the reason why we must turn inward and why we suffer so. If we were strong, which we are not by definition, we would be happy:

Whence then should Doubts and Fears arise?
Why trickling Sorrows drown our Eyes?
Slowly, alas, our Mind receives
The Comforts that our Maker gives.

[“LX,” 5]

We are left to take what pleasure we can in our inevitable grief.

Sustained misery is not humanly possible, and Watts on occasion seems to encourage a quite comfortable religiosity. He wrote in hymn “XXX:”

          The Sorrows of the Mind
          Be banisht from the Place!
Religion never was design'd
          To make our Pleasures less.

[St. 2]

With brusque confidence, this hymn seems to reject the pained piety, even the otherworldliness, fostered in so many others. But if we use the glossary suggested by Watts's other hymns, the “sorrows of the Mind” are tokens of our deafness to the “comforts that our Maker gives,” and the Pleasures are spiritual delights, only available to the believer who has rejected “all created Good.” The appearance of brusque confidence is deceptive.

Complaisant self-satisfaction was one of many moods of Watts's age that found hymn expression, reminding us that the hymns are not a systematic exposition of humanity's relationship to God. Those hymns that reject sorrow and insecurity betray no experience of sighs and groans:

What if we trace the Globe around,
And search from Britain to Japan,
There shall be no Religion found
So Just to God, so safe for Man.

[“CXXXI,” 2]

The verse of these hymns is stripped of the imagery and the intimacy of sensibility.

Watts's visual imagination was inspired to a far greater degree by more sentimentally appealing topics:

Our Sorrows and our Tears we pour
Into the Bosom of our God,
He hears us in the mournful Hour,
And helps us bear the heavy Load.

[“XLVI,” 5]

In such an emblem of divine comfort, all distance is transcended by the images and the tender emotion; our life pain permits contact with God.

The hymns that treat the intimate relationship between Jesus and the believer bring together all of the qualities of Watts's work: his visual and dramatic precision, his cultivation of emotional response; everyday reference; the role-playing method of instruction; and the special nature of divine delight, Watts's goal as religious poet. His favored metaphor for the love between Jesus and the individual Christian is that of erotic passion, a comparison familiar to Watts both from the Bible and from subsequent literary tradition. It suited his purpose and perhaps even yielded shock value, although our modern discomfort with human sexuality may mislead us here.

Jesus has a “charming Name”; he is “the dear Object of our Love,” who “lights our Passions to a Flame” (“XVI”). The “Infinite Lover” (“XXI”) makes my dying bed

Feel soft as downy Pillows are,
While on his Breast I lean my Head,
And breathe my Life out sweetly there.

[“XXXI,” 4]

In religious transport, the singer reports Jesus' answering love: “While Jesus shows his Heart is mine, / And whispers, I am his” (“LIV,” 3). Certainly our longing for “Ev'ning to undress, / That we may rest with God” insists on the singer's acceptance of the metaphor.

Before the cross, the believer is acutely self-conscious:

Thus might I hide my blushing Face
          While his dear Cross appears,
Dissolve my Heart in Thankfulness,
          And melt my Eyes to Tears.

[“IX,” 5]

We are embarrassed to the point of blushing, attracted to the cross, in its “dearness.” Our hearts dissolve and our eyes melt. Sensibility is repeatedly fostered by the reiteration of the dearness, sweetness, even the charm of God, Heaven, and Christ, the cross, and the wounds. A natural development of the combination of dramatic situation, everyday reference, and the cultivation of religious feeling, these hymns are also items in a long tradition of erotic symbolism, deriving from the Song of Songs.

Most accounts of Watts's hymns have taken the poet at his word that the erotic element found in the Horae Lyricae was removed from the Hymns and Spiritual Songs.¹³ Perhaps its combination with ascetic otherworldliness has been misleading. Watts is always careful to advise that our mortal passions are despicable, insisting that holy passion, like holy inspiration, is a different species while at the same time he draws heavily on worldly experience as an imaginative resource. As we remarked at the beginning of this chapter, Watts's asceticism conflicts with his own poetic attachment to substantial reality. The experience of the lover of Jesus is almost too realistically represented by the experience of human lovers, regardless of the seventeenth-century precedents, and we easily forget the severe principles of restraint that Watts upheld in his hymn theory:

5 And if no Evening Visit's paid
          Between my Saviour and my Soul,
          How dull the Night! how sad the Shade!
          How mournfully the Minutes roll!
6 This flesh of mine might learn as soon
          To live, yet part with all my Blood;
          To breath when vital Air is gone,
          Or thrive and grow without my Food.
7 Christ is my Light, my Life, my Care,
          My blessed Hope, my heavenly Prize;
          Dearer than all my Passions are,
          My Limbs, my Bowels, or my Eyes.
8 The Strings that twine about my Heart,
          Tortures and Racks may tear them off;
          But they can never, never part
          With their dear hold of Christ my Love.

[“C”]

The picture of a disappointed lover facing a long, lonely night in the fifth stanza is followed by a review of all the essentials of physical life. The superiority of divine love to all such physical claims is summarized in the metaphysical conceit of stanza 8, in which the heart is bound to Christ more inseparably than to the veins that feed into it. The physical details are designed to encourage overcommitment to the metaphor of divine love, just as the physical agony of the Crucifixion was intensified, forcing our response.

The divine love hymns are, in theory, made possible by the restraint of devotional purpose and the premise of ascetic denial of the flesh (“Give me new Passions, Joys and Fears, / And turn the Stone to Flesh” [“CXXX”]). Control of these hymns is dependent on Watts's repeated reminders that earthly passions, limbs, bowels, and eyes are of little or no importance. He appears to permit neither worldly pleasure nor self-acceptance, trying to limit the conventional analogy, forcing it to work in one direction only, bringing to life the intimacy between the believer and the Savior without sanctifying sensuality. Grotesque intrusions often serve to remind the singers of the spirituality of the experience being celebrated:

Sprinkled afresh with pard'ning Blood
          I lay me down to rest,
As in th' Embraces of my God,
          Or on my Saviour's Breast.

[“VII,” 6]

The blood sprinkling colors the picture of going to bed on the breast of Jesus, embraced by God, the grotesque preliminary harnessing the image with bizarre, if spiritually edifying, results.

The survival of the analogy, regardless of the restrictions of ascetic denial and the grotesque intrusions, indicates Watts's primary allegiance, as a hymn writer, to the affective power of poetry. The potential benefit of the divine love hymns, as they worked on the imaginations of the singers, impressing them with their passionate, physical dependence on the Lord, was worth the risk to the spirit of denial. As in the preface to the Horae Lyricae, Watts's faith in the evangelical power of stirring poetry supersedes his own distrust of the world of sinful flesh and the tempting Fancy. Poetry wins.¹⁴

WATTS'S ACHIEVEMENT

We have suggested that the primary purpose of Watts's hymns, in theory and in practice, was the controlled education of the religious sensibility of his singers. The passions are rehearsed in response to affecting scenes. The visual precision of these hymns is essential to their purpose, making visible and immediate what through time or distance or distraction may have become obscured. Such visibility and immediacy—of God in heaven, Bible stories, the working of the Sacrament, the ecstasy of divine love—are intended to rouse in the singers the pious passions of love, fear, hope, desire, sorrow, wonder, and joy. These hymns called for clear, powerful poetry, finely tuned to the common psyche.

The Mark Lane setting of prosperous, educated London Independency suited Watts's talent and distinguishes his hymns from those of many of his successors. He wrote for a relatively sophisticated, homogeneous group that could be trusted to understand and to respond appropriately to his verses. His parishioners' familiarity with the Bible and with exegetical tradition, their schooling in sermons and psalms, provided a quantity of possible reference and recollection that facilitated excellent poetry. The Mark Lane flock and their fellow Independents, moreover, reliably responded as he wished to Watts's affecting stimuli, and trust was essential to the literature of sensibility. While he wrote of the limitations of the “plainer sort of Christians” and the poetic restraint necessarily exercised by the hymn writer if such people were to be properly moved, the task of reaching out to all the singers and teaching them to feel was easier in Watts's setting than it would be for Wesley or at Olney.

If Watts's method demanded his precise comprehension of and sympathy with the difficulties of these singers' spiritual lives, the hymns suggest that they, both the “politer part of Mankind” and those of “the meanest Capacity,” had challenged him to make religion matter, by means of poetry, in the midst of their secular concerns. Both the intense, frequently jolting imagery, broken in upon by responsive sighs and groans, and the ascetic call for withdrawal from the crowd to a “sweet Retirement within our selves” indicate the need for effort to achieve spiritual experience, to “find” God. The inspirational charge laid to hymns thus far surpassed any expectations of psalms. Moreover, if Watts could, through poetry, make visible the invisible, make his singers respond to that to which they had formerly been indifferent, and clarify certain doctrinal points, he asked more of hymn poetry certainly than most of us ask of “odes.”

In his defense of religious poetry, Watts had particularly stressed its efficacy, its usefulness as a means of advancing and refining devotion. Like so much didactic poetry theory, his formulations easily mislead us if we miss the respect for pure poetry that they imply. (Misled, we undervalue the hymns as poetry.) Watts was no strict utilitarian. He trusted the pleasure of poetry to uplift and to educate, to “elevate us to the most delightful and divine sensations.” By being divine and, in fact, devotionally instructive, the delight was no less pure. A piety that stressed the lively feelings of the believer turned naturally to poetry. The power to move the singers' emotions in response to recognition of absolute truth belongs to pure poetry uncompromised by any ulterior motives. Within Watts's critical frame, poetry is elevated in importance rather than subordinated to utilitarian ends. Despite the formal limitations of set meters and the imaginative limitations of poetry for popular consumption, the hymns were designed to achieve all that was expected of devotional lyrics. They, no less than the more elaborate odes of the Horae Lyricae, ask that the poet “dress the Scenes of Religion in their proper figures of Majesty, Sweetness and Terror” in order to “diffuse Vertue and allure Souls to God.” Watts encourages us to regard the hymns as a purer poetry, for all their necessary limitations. The stripping away of “flow'ry Expressions that gratify'd the Fancy” cost nothing that was ultimately to the point.

Watts's belief in the power of poetry was no simple trust. He defended the idea of religious poetry and its usefulness and wrote lyrics and hymns that are quite daring but hesitated nonetheless, restrained by a suspicion of the vagaries of the fancy and the temptations of worldliness. He both believed, or alternately believed, that humankind was salvable by means of a poetic appeal to the passions and that our depravity and the contamination of “all things here below” were absolute. The prospect of utter damnation, certainly, discouraged any indulgence in sensibility. The stress implicit in the very different premises of Watts's own traditional theology and his devotional aesthetics—no less his own—remained. The suspicion of profane poetry reflected in the preface to the Horae Lyricae balanced and controlled any tendency Watts might have had toward either overindulgence in sentiment or imaginative flights not quite to the purpose of the hymns. Watts's ambivalence was one more feature of his mind that suited his paternity of the English hymn.

Such a double allegiance is also one manifestation of the larger synthesis that underlies all of Watts's work, the attempted integration of traditional approaches to Protestant material with the new literature of the early eighteenth century. Watts's appreciation of Christian spectacle is traditional. His dramatic flair, apparent in his own mention of hymn “scenes” and in his little plays and large tableaux, recalls to mind the seventeenth-century masques, emblems, and heroic drama. In their appeal to the eye, they also resemble the German hymns of the same period. The strong images, in their substantial, forceful demonstration of religious truth, are both entertaining and memorable. Their success generally depends upon the singers' familiarity with biblical material and the conventions of devotional literature, including the traditional images of blood and wounds, worms and death, and divine love.

Watts's departure from tradition, which affected the presentation of the material, was his strong emphasis on the inwardness of religious experience, its seat in the passions. While the individual focus and introspection of Calvinist tradition had perhaps pointed the way, Watts goes further, his confidence in the ability of the passions to serve pious education suggesting the new “enlightened” trust in the native resources of humanity, in its educability. The sentimental moralists maintained that, if our better feelings are touched, we will advance in virtue, a conviction that underlies much of the poetry of Pope and even the satires of Swift. Watts's version identifies virtue and piety: the rousing of our pious passions stimulates our “Zeal and Devotion.” The general interest of the day in moral philosophy and psychology played its part, radically modifying what had been a simple sense of the accountability of each individual for his or her thoughts and deeds. Watts suggests that our spiritual sensitivity, like its moral equivalent, can be advanced and refined through exercise. His interest in the common psyche, his use of general mankind and its perceptions as a starting point in his hymns, and his commitment to the refinement of the religious sensibility are all traceable to this contemporary tendency.

The constructive tension between Watts's traditionalism and his radical modernity—for such it was in 1707—as it manifested itself both in moral theology and in poetic theory, yielded the English hymn. Tradition asked that the hymns be controlled and reasonable, that they avoid enthusiasm. Affective pious poetry asked that the singers be touched. The verse of modern poets had been considered improper for congregational use. The new age suggested that whatever penetrated the indifference of the multitudes was justifiable. The wave of the immediate future belonged to the enthusiasts, whose belief in hymns was unrestrained by Calvinist worries about either human inadequacy or original composition, and for them traditional spectacle mattered much less than sensational charismatic experience. Restraint of a different sort would appear in the Olney collection, fifty years later.

Notes

1. While his treatment of hymns is not particularly reliable, Robert Tudor Jones has provided a comprehensive history of Independency in Congregationalism in England, 1662-1962 (London: Independent Press, 1962). The Independents were a minority within the dissenting faction who disagreed with the Presbyterian desire for a uniform church government. They were upstanding, conservative, bourgeois Calvinists who were particularly interested in education, as their children had been barred from the universities. Samuel Johnson was criticized for praising a dissenter in his Life of Watts. See James H. Leicester, “Dr. Johnson and Isaac Watts,” New Rambler, 17 (June 1964): 2-10. Harry Escott has written a modern, if somewhat partial, biography of Watts: Isaac Watts, Hymnographer: A Study of the Beginnings, Development, and Philosophy of the English Hymn (London: Independent Press, 1962).

2. Preface to the Horae Lyricae, p. vi. Citations refer to the “altered and much enlarged” edition of 1709. It is misleading either to identify hymns with these poems or to suggest that the preface is “one of the most significant documents in eighteenth-century literary criticism.” See Escott, Isaac Watts, p. 61, and Hoxie Neale Fairchild, Religious Trends in English Poetry, 6 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939-62), vol. 1, Protestantism and the Cult of Sentiment, 1700-1740, p. 130, respectively.

3. Cf. “I could never believe that Roughness and Obscurity added any thing to the true Grandeur of a Poem: nor will I ever affect Archaisms, Exoticisms, and a quaint Uncouthness of Speech, in order to become perfectly Miltonian” (preface to Horae Lyricae, pp. xx-xxi). It has been routine to see Watts “protesting with all of the power at his command against the sterility of Neo-classic poetry” (Arthur Paul Davis, Isaac Watts: His Life and Works (New York: Dryden Press, 1943), p. 162. An exception is John Hoyles, who seems to go to the opposite extreme in The Waning of the Renaissance, 1640-1740: Studies in the Thought and Poetry of Henry More, John Norris, and Isaac Watts (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971).

4. For Watts's preface and the hymns we used the edition by Selma L. Bishop, Hymns and Spiritual Songs (London: Faith Press, 1962). The hymn numbers refer to book II unless otherwise indicated.

5. Watts commented further in his preface: “If the Verse appears so gentle and flowing as to incur the Censure of Feebleness, I may honestly affirm, that sometimes it cost me Labour to make it so: Some of the Beauties of Poesy are neglected, and some willfully defac'd: I have thrown out the Lines that were too sonorous, and have given an Allay to the Verse, lest a more exalted Turn of Thought or Language should darken or disturb the Devotion of the weakest Souls”(p. liv).

6. See further discussion of “Devotional Response,” below. K. L. Parry noted the tension unavoidable in a Calvinist position influenced by eighteenth-century rationalism, in “Isaac Watts: Hymn-Writer and Divine,” Listener 40 (December 2, 1948): 841-42. Hoyles considers Watts's solution to this conflict important in the intellectual history of the age (Waning of the Renaissance, p. 156).

7. An interesting seventy-year-old article in the Edinburgh Review suggested that the appeal of Roman Catholic ceremonial was transferred to Protestant hymns: “The Figure had been taken from the Crucifix, the Pietà by the roadway was shattered, the Stations effaced from the wall; but Wesley wrote with a painter's brush—‘Who is this that comes from far, / Clad in garments dipped in blood?’” (“Hymnology, Classic and Romantic,” ER 208 [July 1908]: 67). The idea better suits the hymns of Watts.

8. As an older man, Watts wrote extensively on the psychology of religious passions and their place in devotional life. The governance of “Affections by the sacred Dictates of Reason and Religion” promises to prevent bigotry and the madness of persecution. The aesthetic corollary of such discipline would be: “Bend the more lawful and useful Passions of Love, Desire, Joy, Fear, Anger and Sorrow, like young Trees, into a beautiful and regular Form, and prune off all their luxuriant Branches.” Not surprisingly, sermons are to be shorn of emotional appeals, “a mere Explication of the Word of God, without inforcing these Things on the Conscience, by a pathetick Address to the Heart …, without seeking to awaken any of the devout Sensations of Hope and Fear, and Love and Joy, tho' the God of Nature hath ordained them to be the most effectual Allurements or Spurs to Duty in this present animal State.” Citations refer, respectively, to Watts's preface to his Discourses on the Love of God and the Use and Abuse of the Passions in Religion: With a devout Meditation suited to each Discourse. To which is prefixed, A plain and particular Account of the Natural Passions, with Rules for the Government of them (London, 1729), pp. viii-ix; and to The Doctrine of the Passions, Explain'd and Improv'd; or, A brief and comprehensive Scheme of the Natural Affections of Mankind, attempted in a plain and easy Method; with an Account of their Names, Nature, Appearances, Effects, and different Uses in human Life: to which are subjoin'd Moral and Divine Rules For the Regulation or Government of them (1729; 3rd ed., corrected and enlarged, London: Hett, 1739). Contrast Charles Wesley's recollection of a successful sermon: “Now the power and blessing came. My mouth and their hearts were opened. The rocks were broken in pieces, and melted into tears on every side. I continued exhorting them, from seven till ten, to save themselves from this untoward generation. We could hardly part. I left the little society of twenty members confirmed and comforted.” The passage is cited by Robert Newton Flew in The Hymns of Charles Wesley: A Study of Their Structure (London: Epworth Press, 1953), p. 38.

9. A second illustration is hymn CLXX, “God Incomprehensible and Sovereign.”

10. Given the considerable treatment of hellfire in the hymns, Martha England's report is problematic: “Watts made no secret of how he searched the Bible for refutation of the belief in eternal punishment, could not find it, sadly reported what he found, and said as little about it as conscience would allow” (Martha England and John Sparrow, Hymns Unbidden: Donne, Herbert, Blake, Emily Dickinson, and the Hymnographers [New York: New York Public Library, 1966], p. 80).

11. Hoyles, so perceptive in his reading of Watts's theories, fails in his reading of hymns, as he tries to force them to conform to his thesis: “Classicism shunned the particular vision, sensory or imaginative; and there can be few poets so consistent in their avoidance of the visual than Watts” (Waning of the Renaissance, p. 236).

12. See discussion and bibliographic references provided in chapter 1, particularly the work of René Wellek, W. P. Friederich, and Marc Bertonasco.

13. Cf. Robert Stevenson: “At least he later had perspicuity enough to discard the language of physical rapture which pervades the Divine Love poems in his 1706 volume.” “Dr. Watts' ‘Flights of Fancy,’” Harvard Theological Review 42 (October 1949): 245.

14. “I think I may be bold to assert, that I never compos'd one Line of them with any other Design than what they are apply'd to here; and I have endeavour'd to secure them all from being perverted and debas'd to wanton Passions, by several Lines in them that can never be apply'd to a meaner Love”—preface to Horae Lyricae (1709), pp. xvi-xvii. Watts's later regrets are seen in his preface to Devout Exercises of the Heart in Meditation and Soliloquy, Prayer and Praise, by Elizabeth Rowe, “Reviewed and Published at her request by I. Watts D.D.” (1737; 6th ed., 1754): “But if I may be permitted to speak the Sense of maturer Age, I can hardly think this the happiest Language in which Christians should generally discover their warm Sentiments of Religion, since the clearer and more spiritual Revelations of the New Testament” (pp. 10-11).