Sarah Flower Adams (b. 1805, d. 1848) wanted the stage. Her lungs ruled against her. She turned to verse, and in 1841 she handed her minister thirteen hymns for a collection he was assembling, Hymns and Anthems. One of the thirteen retells Genesis 28, the night Jacob lays his head on a stone and dreams of a ladder set on the earth with its top in heaven. Adams called it “Nearer, My God, to Thee.”
She wrote it inside a small and radical world. Her congregation met at South Place Chapel in London under William Johnson Fox (1786-1864), a Unitarian who had broken with orthodox Christianity and would sit in Parliament. Unitarians of his stripe kept the moral example of Jesus and dropped the Trinity, the blood atonement, and the threat of hell. They trusted reason. They trusted the conscience. They held that a man climbs toward God by growing better, not by being washed in a sacrifice he did not make. Adams had already worked the theme at length in her verse drama Vivia Perpetua, about a Christian martyr who rises to God through her own death.
Read the hymn and you find that creed in it. There is no Christ in the verses. There is no cross of Calvary, only the personal cross the singer carries, the “cross that raiseth me.” There is a stone for a pillow, griefs called stony, and a ladder of steps to heaven that the singer climbs by taking what God sends. Hymnodists noticed the absence and some complained of it. A hymn about drawing near to God that never names the Son struck Trinitarian ears as thin, but the thinness has a use.
Eliza Flower (1803-1846), Sarah’s older sister, set the words to music. Eliza was the better-known artist in her day. Then consumption took her. Sarah nursed her and caught it. Sarah died two years after her sister, in London, in 1848, at forty-three. The woman who wrote the hymn of ascent watched ascent fail to lift a body off a sickbed, and then went the same way. No ship. No band. No crowd. A room, a cough, a sister already in the ground.
Hold that picture and bring in Ernest Becker (1924-1974). In The Denial of Death and Escape from Evil, Becker argues that a man knows he will die, cannot bear the knowledge, and so builds a scheme that lets his life count past the grave. Becker calls these schemes hero systems. A hero system tells a man what counts as a life worth having lived and what counts as a death worth dying. It hands him a part in a drama larger than his body. Cultures script the part in different ways. The warrior earns his place by courage, the saint by holiness, the father by his sons, the builder by his works. Each system answers the same question. How do I count for something when I am food for worms.
Adams answered it in four stanzas. Loss raises you. The cross, the stone, the dark, the wandering, each becomes a step. Suffering builds the stair. That is a hero system in miniature, and it belongs to a particular world, the dissenting, reasoning, Romantic Protestantism of South Place Chapel.
Sixty-four years after she wrote it, the hymn met the death the twentieth century would not stop retelling. The RMS Titanic struck an iceberg late on April 14, 1912, and sank in the small hours of April 15. Of the 2,224 aboard, around 1,500 died. The legend holds that the ship’s band, led by Wallace Hartley (1878-1912), played “Nearer, My God, to Thee” as the deck tilted and the water climbed.
Truth before comfort, so say the doubtful part first. Survivors disagreed. Some heard ragtime to the end. Some named a waltz, “Songe d’Automne.” Some recalled a different hymn, “Abide with Me.” Those who named Adams’s hymn could not settle on the tune, since three compete, Bethany by the American Lowell Mason (1792-1872), Horbury by John Bacchus Dykes (1823-1876), and Propior Deo by Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900), and Hartley the Methodist might have known the British two and not the American one. Six years before, the band and passengers of the SS Valencia sang the hymn as that ship broke up off Vancouver Island, and some historians think the Valencia handed the Titanic its script.
Set the doubt down and keep it in view. Whatever the band played, the hymn became the sound the disaster carries in memory, and the reason it can carry that weight is the reason to read it through Becker. On that deck many hero systems waited for the same water, and the same four stanzas meant a different thing to each man who might have heard them. Nearer, the hymn promised. Nearer to what, each system answered on its own terms.
Start with the men who held the instruments. Hartley led seven other musicians. They had no duty to play. They chose to. A working musician on a White Star liner ranked as hired help, brought aboard to fill the first-class evening with light airs and ragtime. On the tilting deck the job ended and the men kept doing it. For the craftsman the hero system runs through the work. A man is the quality of what he makes and the steadiness of his hands while he makes it. To keep playing as the bow goes under is to die at the bench, tools in hand, the job not dropped. Hartley is said to have told a friend that if he ever went down with a ship he would play “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” For him nearer meant the post. Stay at it. The music is the man, and the man does not run.
Up among the first-class staterooms a different system dressed for the occasion. Benjamin Guggenheim (1865-1912) had gone to bed and come up to a sinking ship. He sent his life belt away, returned to his cabin, and put on white tie and tails. He told a steward to carry word to his wife: “We have dressed in our best, and are prepared to go down like gentlemen.” He added that he would not die like a beast. John Jacob Astor IV (1864-1912), the richest man on the ship, saw his wife into a boat and stepped back. For the Edwardian gentleman the hero system runs on the code and the witness of his peers. Manners outlast the body. Bearing is the soul. A man earns his standing past death in the verdict of the others who will tell the story, and the story must record that he stood aside, kept his collar straight, asked for a brandy, and did not push past a woman to a seat. Nearer, for Guggenheim, meant nearer to the code, and the code held that how a man dies is the last sentence the world writes about him.
On A Deck an old couple took two deck chairs. Isidor Straus (1845-1912) had built Macy’s into a great store and served a term in Congress. Ida Straus (1849-1912) had been his wife for forty-one years. Men pressed her toward a boat. They offered the old man a seat beside her, an exception to the rule of women first, on account of his age. He refused while younger men stood on the deck. She refused to go without him. Where you go, I go, she is said to have told him, and they sat down together to wait. Their hero system runs through the marriage. The thing that does not sink is the bond, four decades of it, and to step into a boat alone drowns the one thing worth keeping afloat. Nearer, for the Strauses, meant nearer to each other. A heaven without the other was no heaven they wanted.
Below, in the steerage, the Church did its work. Father Thomas Byles (1870-1912), an Englishman and a convert, had said Mass that Sunday morning and preached on the need for a lifebelt of faith against spiritual shipwreck, not knowing the hull already had its hours numbered. When the water came he went down to the third-class passengers, many of them Irish and Catholic, raised his hand, and called for calm. He heard confessions. He gave absolution. He refused a seat in a boat twice. As the stern rose he stood among more than a hundred kneeling people and led the Rosary, and the responses came back loud, Catholic and not, while the last boats pulled away. For the sacramental system the soul rises by the Church’s grace, confessed and anointed before the end. A good death is a death in a state of grace, the soul handed up to God through the priest. Nearer, in steerage, meant nearer to absolution. The hymn’s Protestant ladder and the priest’s Rosary aim at the same heaven and ask different things of the dying.
Keep going down, past the priest, to the people the hymn could not reach. The Titanic carried more than seven hundred in third class, Irish, Scandinavian, Italian, Syrian, most of them bound for American work and American children. Their hero system ran through the future. A man crosses an ocean so his name goes on in a new country, in sons and daughters who will have what he never had. The barriers that kept steerage from the boat deck, whatever their exact working that night, fell hardest on these passengers, and many died below the waterline with the future they had crossed the ocean to build still locked on the decks above them. Here the hymn turns cruel. It promises that loss raises you. For the drowned emigrant loss took the one ascent he believed in, the climb out of the old country into the new. Nearer, for him, meant nearer to nothing he could name, the dream cut off behind a gate.
Go up again, to the men who built the ship and believed in her. Thomas Andrews (1873-1912) drew her lines at Harland and Wolff and sailed on her maiden voyage to watch her perform. He went below after the collision, counted the flooded compartments, and knew the sum before anyone else. He spent his last hour helping passengers into belts and boats. The age that built the Titanic had a hero system of its own, the faith of the machine and the engineer, the trust that man rises by what he can make, that steel and rivets and watertight doors push back the sea and push back death with it. The ship was the cathedral of that faith. They called her practically unsinkable and half forgot the practically. For Andrews, nearer carried no comfort the hymn could give. He knew his arithmetic had failed and the water was honest. If a hero system can break on a single night, his broke at twenty past two in the morning, and he met it sober, counting boats, finding them too few.
Stand back and the deck holds more systems than one night can sort. A Jewish passenger who knew the Genesis chapter in Hebrew would hear something the hymn leaves out. In the Torah the stone at Bethel and the ladder belong to Jacob, and the promise God makes him is no private ladder to a private heaven but a covenant, a land, a people as many as the dust of the earth. The same stone pillow, and a heaven made of descendants and a homeland rather than a soul’s solo climb. A Stoic on that deck might reach past God for composure, the only thing left in his power as the water rose. A revolutionary might hear the hymn as the old lie, the drug that teaches the steerage to climb a ladder in the next world instead of demanding a seat in this one. A man with no god at all might hear only a tune from childhood, his mother’s parlor, and grieve for a comfort he could not believe. Each of them faces the same water. Each carries a different account of what a death is for.
Return to the thinness of the verses, the missing Christ that troubled the Trinitarians. The gap is the reason the hymn could do all this. A creed thick with one tribe’s doctrine dies with that tribe. A hymn that names almost nothing in particular can be filled by anyone. Adams wrote a vessel. Into it a Methodist bandleader, a Catholic priest’s mourners, an Edwardian agnostic, a grieving secular son, even a queen and three American presidents could each pour his own heaven. Victoria (1819-1901) favored it. President William McKinley (1843-1901) is said to have whispered its lines as he died of an assassin’s bullet. It played at the burials of Garfield and Ford. Becker’s harsh point fits here. The hero system that spreads widest wins by portability. It lets the most people feel heroic before the same darkness, and truth has little to do with the spread. Adams’s near-empty ladder beat thicker, prouder creeds at the deathbed for the plain reason that it asked the dying to believe almost nothing and let them feel they climbed.
Which returns to the doubt set down earlier. The historians may be right that the band played a waltz, or “Abide with Me,” or nothing anyone could later fix in memory. The legend grew anyway, and its growth is the last piece of evidence. A civilization that had built the unsinkable ship and watched it sink needed a scene in which men chose how to die, in which order and dignity and faith survived the failure of the machine. The hymn supplied the scene. The story of the band playing “Nearer, My God, to Thee” gave the public the assurance it required, that the death meant something, that the steerage and the millionaire and the bandsman all climbed the same ladder in the end. The hero system did more than tell men how to die. It went back afterward and wrote the death it needed.
Sarah Flower Adams never saw any of it. She died in a London room in 1848 with her sister two years in the ground, both of them taken by the same slow illness, no orchestra, no headlines, four stanzas of hers loose in a Unitarian hymnal that asked the reader to believe the cross might raise him. She wrote about the only ascent she could still picture from a sickbed, the climb a soul makes while the body fails. Sixty years on, strangers on a sinking ship, or strangers who needed to believe strangers had, turned her private prayer into the anthem of a public death, and filled her empty ladder with a hundred heavens she never named. The stone is always the same stone. The pillow under the head of the dying man is hard, and the dream above it is whatever his hero system lets him see. Adams gave the dream no fixed shape, and so it fit them all.
