I. MEDIEVAL LATIN POETRY The Oxford Book of Medieval Latin Poetry. Chosen by S. GASELEE. 2. A History of Christian-Latin Poetry. Clarendon Press. 1927. By F. S. E. RABY. Oxford: 3. The Wandering Scholars. By HELEN WADDELL. Constable. 1927. IN IN the field of classical scholarship perhaps the most striking development during the last twenty-five years has been in the direction of medieval Latin, a branch of linguistic study once regarded with indifference and held to be out of bounds, but now seen to be of vital interest to the humanist as well as to the historian. In France, the home of Migne's Patrologia Latina, the greatest of all medieval collections, Monceaux and de Labriolle have been carrying on the work of Haureau and Léon Gautier. In Germany, Wilhelm Meyer and Max Manitius have proved themselves worthy successors to Schmeller and Grimm. In America there has been coordination of effort, and a band of scholars, led by Rand, Haskins and Allen, have established a Medieval Academy, with a quarterly journal, Speculum, devoted to every branch of medieval literature. As for our own country, where in the middle of the nineteenth century Thomas Wright did such pioneer work in editing medieval texts, the three books set at the head of this page show that when it comes to a question of literary taste, sound scholarship and creative imagination, we still need not fear comparison. The history of medieval Latin poetry, with which in its various aspects our three authors are concerned, has at least one advantage over some other branches of medieval study; it has a definite beginning and a definite end. It may also be conveniently divided into three sections, the first dealing with religious poems, the second with occasional and satirical verse, the third with love songs. Of these three the religious section of hymns, tropes, sequences and pious meditations is considerably the largest, and occupies fifty-five volumes in Dreves' monumental work, "Analecta Hymnica Medii Aevi." Under the second heading also a vast amount of miscellaneous stuff has to be considered, for medieval writers were highly prolific, and much has been preserved to no very great profit. As most literature emanated from the monasteries, the distinction between secular and religious is often hard to make, and frequently metrical form is the best criterion. Secular verse tends to be in one of the classical metres, hexameter, elegiac or sapphic ; religious poetry after the tenth century takes a new form and is accentual with rhyme. From this new poetry of the Church, our third section, the love songs of the twelfth century, directly derives; and it is curious to note how forms invented for liturgical use were transferred to themes of a very different kind. I. On Palm Sunday, in the year 385 A.D., Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, was besieged in the Basilica Portiana by the Arian Emperor, Valentinian II. For five days he and his faithful adherents held out successfully against the imperial forces, and to pass away the long hours Ambrose composed simple hymns to be sung antiphonally by the whole congregation, each hymn being in eight stanzas of four dimeter iambic lines. It was thus that Latin hymnology began, and even if to us the Ambrosian style seems slightly monotonous, in its own day it had a miraculous effect. The Arians accused Ambrose of bewitching the people with his melodies; and Augustine, who was in Milan on that first occasion, writes after his mother's death: "The greatest comfort in my grief came when alone in my bed I recalled the verses of Thy Ambrose : Deus creator omnium, Artus solutos ut quies God that all things did create And the heavens dost moderate, Who doth clothe the day with light, Which may our weakened bodies make It has sometimes been remarked that our English hymn writers have not the true poetic spirit. The criticism, if it be just, applies equally to Ambrose, and although he deserves all the praise he has received, yet, judging by the highest standard, we must acknowledge that the first really great Christian poet is not the Bishop of Milan but the Spaniard Prudentius, born eight years after Ambrose in 348. Prudentius, as Ebert says, took the Ambrosian hymn and made of it a Christian ode, divorcing it from a purely liturgical purpose and giving it a definite literary character. The difference between the two men appears plainly in their writings; Ambrose was a man of action, Prudentius a man of letters; and each excels in his own sphere. Moreover Prudentius has an advantage from a literary standpoint; those of his hymns that are still used are not the verses as he wrote them but centos cleverly drawn from his longer poems; and the process does not, with him, result in a loss but rather the reverse, for if he has a fault it is that he is inclined to be prolix. The Psychomachia, for example, suffers from the usual length of allegorical poems, and so does the Contra Symmachum. The Peristephanon is more vital and its fourteen pieces have a very great historical importance, for in their combination of epic and lyric interest they closely approach the ballad. But the most beautiful of Prudentius' works is the Cathemerinon, "The Christian's Day," from which comes the wonderful hymn for the burial of the dead Nunc suscipe, terra, fovendum, and also the Epiphany hymn which pictures the Innocents playing their childish games in heaven. Here we have a perfect combination of the artistic and the religious spirit, as well as an originality of thought which raises Prudentius high above the common level. After Prudentius the chief names are Sedulius (fl. 450), and Fortunatus, Bishop of Poitiers, the author of Pange, lingua, gloriosi proelium certaminis, a hymn which Remy de Gourmont considered the chef-d'oeuvre de poésie théologique. Under Charlemagne we descend to Alcuin, a great teacher but a poor poet, to Theodulf and to the historian Paul the Deacon, whose sapphics on John the Baptist give us our names for the notes of the sol-fa scale. And then in the tenth century at the monastery of St. Gall comes the cardinal event in the development of medieval poetry, the invention by Notker of a new form of lyric, the Sequence. In the ancient liturgy when the Alleluia was sung it was customary to prolong the final a in a "Jubilus melody. According to the story, Notker found it difficult to keep to the proper tune in singing this, and therefore substituted words for notes as a help to his memory. The result was a simple text following the music of the chant, and Notker's early attempts are in prose of a very ingenuous kind. But the all-important step of fitting syllables to music had been taken, and when, in the next stage, text and melody were both from the same hand, the text soon became the more important element of the two and assumed a rhythmical form based on accent. To rhythm was added assonance and then rhyme, and the revolution. was complete. Accent and rhyme gained the victory over metre and quantity, and lyrical poetry, as we know it now in all modern languages, came to birth. The final stages of this process took place in France during the eleventh and twelfth centuries; but before we turn to the French school we must mention the Italian poets of Monte Cassino and that strange and intriguing character Peter Damiani, who was born at Ravenna in 1007 and died at Faenza 1072. Damiani was the incarnation of medievalism in its gloomiest aspect; for him life was but a toilsome preparation for death, and the world was a place where the devil roamed abroad seeking whom he might devour. Terror of the Last Judgment haunts him continually, and in two great poems he imagines, with the utmost vividness, the torments of that awful day. And yet his feverish spirit sometimes finds relief. In the hymn beginning, Ad perennis vitae fontem mens sitivit arida he sings happily of the glories of Paradise, and in one of the most beautiful of all poems he tells again in the sweetest of rhythms the mystic parable of the Song of Songs : Who is it, who, that knocks upon the door And breaks my slumber ere the night is o'er ? 'O fairest, fairest maid, behold!' he cries, 'Sister and wife, the jewel that I prize Beyond all else, my sweetest, swift arise And open to me. Lo, I am the Son First born and last born of the Highest One ; Swiftly I left my bed and ran to meet him, That nothing from my eager heart should hide. Quick did I run: but ah! I was too late. The watchmen stripped me of my purple dress, When in the darkness of the night they caught me, There is no one quite like Damiani, and the three chief liturgical poets in twelfth century France are Peter the Venerable, more distinguished as an administrator than as a writer, Bernard of Clairvaux, doctor melifluus, a pure mystic, and Adam of S. Victor, a poet of prodigious talent but lacking in real originality. Still, it was in France at this time that the sequence form was perfected and the way prepared for the final splendour of the thirteenth century, when Thomas Aquinas, Jacopone and Thomas of Celano composed the three great hymns which are the supreme achievement of religious verse, the Lauda Sion Salvatorem, the Stabat mater dolorosa, and the Dies irae, dies illa. They are too well known to need more than mention here, and the following version of the first four of the seventeen original stanzas of the Dies Irae is only offered as an example of literal translation. O day of wrath, O dreadful day- How all the world will shake in fear Nature and Death shall stricken fall |