TIMOTHY DUDLEY-SMITH has been writing hymns for more than 50 years. He reckons that his tally is around 450 so far — so still some way to go before he comes close to Charles Wesley’s 6500; but at the rate he is still going in his 91st year, I would not be surprised if he equals Isaac Watts’ total of 600.
In this elegantly written and thoughtful book, he reflects on what he describes as the “functional art” of the hymn-writer. There is much in it that is autobiographical — I particularly enjoyed his description of his daily labours over 20 years during summer holidays in the cottage in Cornwall where he estimates that he wrote more than half his texts — but there are also plentiful quotations from other hymn-writers, poets, and scholars.
This is very much the work of a literary man: he describes the profound early impact of his schoolmaster father’s reading poems to him, and how, as a schoolboy, he regularly sent stories and articles to magazines, usually to be met with a rejection slip. Substantial chapters explore such literary themes as content and form, meaning and language, and rhyme and metre.
Still writing hymns: Bishop Timothy Dudley-Smith, at an RSCM eventDudley-Smith is very clear about his own favourite poets — the late Victorian trinity of Tennyson, Housman, and Walter de la Mare, with the mid-20th-century trio of Betjeman, Eliot, and Larkin coming in some way behind them. Aside from Charles Wesley, his favourite hymn-writers are largely also drawn from the Victorian age, notably John Ellerton, who is frequently quoted. There is relatively little here either from or about his own contemporaries, Fred Pratt Green, Brian Wren, Fred Kaan, and Sydney Carter.
He proposes an interesting set of qualities as the marks of a good hymn: heartfelt, biblical, simple, deep, and uncontroversial. This last requirement perhaps marks him out from his contemporaries, certainly from Sydney Carter. Dudley-Smith stands in a very orthodox Anglican tradition of hymn-writing, an unashamedly Evangelical one as well, in his case; but it is a distinctive kind of Anglican Evangelicalism which is perhaps not much seen today — somehow very English, cultured, eirenic, and gentle. It is broad enough to encompass Noel Coward, W. S. Gilbert, Stephen Sondheim, and Shakespeare, as well as J. I. Packer and Martyn Lloyd-Jones.
There is much here to enjoy in the author’s rich compendium of personal anecdotes and reminiscences, quotations and reflections. There is also much to ponder in his discussion of the future of the hymn. On the whole, despite the onward march of the worship song and chorus, about which he has some fairly caustic observations, he is sanguine.
He ends with a tantalisingly short comment about the sacramentality of the hymn, and moving accounts of the impact of his own hymns on a terminally ill friend and an elderly stroke victim. As long as there are people like Tim Dudley-Smith still turning their considerable talents to writing hymns that are both recognisably traditional and contemporary, there is surely a future for this particular “functional art”.
Dr Ian Bradley is Reader in Church History and Practical Theology at the University of St Andrews.
A Functional Art: Reflections of a hymn writer
Timothy Dudley-Smith
OUP £19.99
(978-0-19-340871-5)
Church Times Bookshop £18