ON THE RESURRECTION OF OUR LORD.
The gates of death are broken through,
The strength of hell is tamed,
And by the holy cross anew
Its cruel king is shamed.
A clearer light has spread its ray
Across the land of gloom
When he who made the primal day
Restores it from the tomb.
For so the true Creator died
That sinners might not die,
And so he has been crucified
That we might rise on high.
For Satan then was beaten back
Where he, our Victor stood;
And that to him was deathly black
Which was our vital good.
For Satan, capturing, is caught,
And as he strikes he dies.
Thus calmly and with mighty thought
The King defeats his lies,
Arising whence he had been brought,
At once, to seek the skies.
Thus God ascended, and returned
Again to visit man;
For having made him first, he yearned
To carry out his plan.
To that lost realm our Saviour flew,
The earliest pioneer,
To people Paradise anew
And give our souls good cheer.
Peter the Venerable died on December 25th, 1156; but how or with what surroundings we are not told. He was buried beside his old comrade, Henry of Blois, Bishop of Winchester, within the walls of the church which Innocent II. consecrated upon his memorable visit to Cluny. And the Histoire Litteraire breaks out into an unusual eulogy; and declares that in his case the title of “Venerable” was no less honorable than that of “Saint.” They did not make “saints” out of such men as Peter—and I don’t quite see why they should. There was too much flesh-and-blood reality about him, too little of musty theology and altogether too little bigotry. But somehow the broad-faced happy sun proves himself to be the “greater light;” while the moon goes palely on, a ghost in an unaccustomed sky.
CHAPTER XXI.
BERNARD OF CLUNY.
In the twelfth century—the time of the great Crusades—we find the noblest and purest of Latin hymns. It is the age of Hildebert, Abelard, Bernard of Clairvaux, Peter of Cluny, and Adam of St. Victor. But among them all I find no one who has inspired a deeper and more lovely desire for the heavenly land than Bernard of Cluny.
The information about him is very meagre. He was born at Morlaix in Brittany, of English parents. He seems to have attained to no ecclesiastical dignity—such men seldom care for baubles and trinkets. But his is as true a soul as ever burned like a star on a summer night, against the warm, obscure, palpitating heaven of eternal hope. The date of his prominence is fixed by the fact that Peter the Venerable was his abbot, and it is therefore included between 1122 and 1156. I have (in The Heavenly Land) myself assigned the Laus Patriae Coelestis—his famous and only poem, which is addressed to Abbot Peter, to 1145 or thereabouts.
His single up-gush of melody is a lamentation over the evil condition of the times in which he lives. They were indeed days to sadden the soul of the saint; and he called his poem De Contemptu Mundi; for he despised the immundus mundus—the foul world in which he was forced to remain. It consists of some three thousand lines of dactylic hexameter, and was first published (so says Trench, who is its step-parent) by Matthias Flacius Illyricus in his scarce and little known supplement to the Catalogus Testium Veritatis. In this “Catalogue of Witnesses to the Truth” he gathers all those who have testified against the papacy, and the supplement, Varia doctorum piorumque Virorum de Corrupto Ecclesiae Statu Poemata (1556), is made up of hymns and poems in which the pious within the Church, as well as without her walls, sorrowed over her corruption.
Bernard’s poem is sometimes known, therefore, by his own title, De Contemptu Mundi, and sometimes by that given by Trench to his cento of about one hundred lines, Laus Patriae Coelestis, the “Praise of the Heavenly Land.” From this cento one would derive altogether an erroneous idea of the whole; but Dr. Neale, who wrote with the full text before him, although he paraphrased but part of it, tells us that the poem, in great part, is a bitter satire on the fearful wickedness of the times. It was the part Trench passed by for which Matthias Flacius Illyricus, its first editor, cared the most. The sins and greediness of the Court of Rome are the theme of the eighty-five lines he has embodied in the text of the Catalogus itself. By both that and the poems of his supplement, he sought to justify the Protestant Reformation on the side of Christian discipline and morals.[10]
The translators have had a hard problem in Bernard’s poem, and but few have attempted to “bend the bow of Ulysses.” Dr. Neale has achieved the most popular and useful result, in the version from which “Jerusalem the Golden” has been extracted, but he does not pretend to literalness. “My own translation,” he says, “is so free as to be little more than an imitation.” Dr. Coles has gone straight away from the dactyls and made a version in anapests—a metre which does not do justice to Bernard. Archbishop Trench has rendered a few lines in the same measure as the original. I have myself followed (in 1867) the exact metre and rhyme of the original poem; but such a version is rather curious than useful. The translation signed by “O. A. M., Cherry Valley,” is in its typography, while fine and clear, affectedly antique. The metrical power of this version is inferior. It is dactylic but not fluent, and does not at all represent the original. That by Mr. Gerard Moultrie is praised by Dr. Trench as metrically close and poetically beautiful. I have no hesitation in saying it is the best version which has appeared in English. It seems to keep both to the spirit and the letter of the original, and is in all respects a remarkable achievement. It, however, omits the double rhyme, and thus avoids the chief difficulty of a reproduction of the form of the original. That by Rev. Jackson Mason (1880) will not stand a comparison with Mr. Moultrie’s, as it halts and breaks in its measure and produces an effect on the ear far from pleasant.
The difficulty of translation is due entirely to the character of the verse. Bernard himself declares “unless that spirit of wisdom and understanding had been with me, and flowed in upon so difficult a metre, I could not have composed so long a work.” Not that this form of verse was original with him. Peter Damiani has used it in one of his hymns to our Lord’s mother:
“O miseratrix, O dominatrix, praecipe dictu
Ne devastemur, ne lapidemur, grandinis ictu.”
And, to go farther back still, a certain Theodulus, who lived in the reign of the Emperor Zeno (474-91) wrote a poem of nine hundred lines on Bernard’s own theme, De Contemptu Mundi, in the same metre:
“Pauper amabalis et venerabilis est benedictus
Dives inutilis insatiabilis, est maledictus.
Qui bona negligit et mala diligit intrat abyssum;
Nulla pecunia, nulla potentia liberat ipsum.”
A glance will show the nature of this trouble which the patient Bernard encountered. Take the two lines:
“Hora novíssima, tempora péssima sunt, vigilémus!
Ecce minaciter, imminet árbiter, ille suprémus.”
That is:
“These are the látter times,
These are not bétter times,
Let us stand waiting!
Lo, how with áwfulness,
He, first in láwfulness,
Comes, arbitrating!”
Of course it is infinitely harder to the translator who is restricted, than to the composer who can eddy around his subject—led by the rhyme as much and as freely as he will. And this is what Bernard always does. His verses are ejaculations, desires, lamentations, longings—measured out by the “leonine hexameter” which he employs. To show the beauty still untranslated, as well as to exhibit more of the structure of the poem, I append four of these lines:
“Pax ibi florida, pascua vivida, viva medulla,
Nulla molestia, nulla tragoedia, lacryma nulla.
O sacra potio, sacra refectio, pax animarum
O pius, O bonus, O placidus sonus, hymnus earum.”
Thus Englished, closely:
“Peace is there flourishing,
Pasture-land nourishing,
Fruitful forever.
There is no aching breast,
There is no breaking rest,
Tears are seen never.
O sacred draught of bliss!
Peace, like a waft of bliss!
Sustenance holy!
O dear and best of sounds,
Heard in the rest of sounds,
Hymned by the lowly!”
Or thus, less closely and more according to the spirit of the poem:
“Peace doth abide in thee;
None hath denied to thee
Fruitage undying.
Thou hast no weariness;
Naught of uncheeriness
Moves thee to sighing.
Draught of the stream of life,
Joy of the dream of life,
Peace of the spirit!
Sacred and holy hymns,
Placid and lowly hymns,
Thou dost inherit!”
So strange and subtle is the charm of this marvellous poem, with its abrupt and startling rhythm, that it affects me even yet, though I have but swept my fingers lightly over a single chord. I seem to myself to have again taken into my hand the old familiar harp, whose strings I have often struck in times of darkness or of depression of soul, and to be tuning it once more to the heavenly harmony which the old monk tried to catch. Perhaps some day, when the clouds are removed, I shall see him, and understand even better than now the glory that lit his lonely cell, and made him feel that
“Earth looks so little and so low
When faith shines full and bright.”
CHAPTER XXII.
ADAM OF ST. VICTOR.
The school of St. Victor, in Paris, was founded by William of Champeaux, the teacher and rival of Abelard, at the commencement of the twelfth century. It is known to history as having been the abode of three distinguished scholars, Hugo, Richard, and Adam. Hugo and Richard of St. Victor were mystics, and Vaughan, in Hours with the Mystics, has set them before us. From this and other sources, we grow more and more amazed to find the immense influence of such a school. A century from its foundation showed St. Victor to be the parent of thirty abbeys and of more than eighty priories. Here in these cells, like bees in a hive, the busy monks were laying up the only honey of the Dark Ages—multiplying manuscripts, delving into remote philosophies, muddling their brains over abstruse questions, but now and then leaving behind them something to benefit mankind. Theology and dialectics were their great and indeed their only pursuits. Like the swirls of a sluggish stream beneath its banks, they occasionally caught and kept fresh some broken flower from the shore. Thus, one may, for example’s sake, put a certain pretty idea of Hugo of St. Victor into modern verse:
“Hugo, St. Victor’s prior—a man
Gentle and sweet, contemplative and wise,
Makes mention in his fine and mystic plan
Of three great steps by which our spirits rise:
First, Cogitation—when we turned our eyes;
Then, Meditation—when our minds began
With hovering wing the kindled thought to scan;
Last, Contemplation—which all doubt defies.
Yea, and he saith that, in the greenest wood
Of stubborn souls, this glory kindleth so
That the pure flame against the sap will glow
And be by nothing finally withstood—
The smoke itself be parted to and fro,
Until clear light shall shine in constant good.”
Richard was the disciple and successor of this gentle-spirited Hugo. In 1114 the priory became an abbacy, and when Richard was prior in 1162, he had for abbot no very godly person, since under Ervisius all discipline was relaxed, and scandal and sensuality began to rule. But Richard stood out stoutly and with good judgment; and he lived to see the old harmony and glory return again. In his day and in that of Adam, which was contemporaneous with his, the school represented the dialectical and theologic, rather than the spiritual and mystical side of religion; and yet it did good work, as a peacemaker, for the truth. It gives us little enough, however, with which to fall in love. Massive it may be, and intricate in its curious ability respecting useless pieces of chop-logic, but the profound piety which belongs to every age and clime did not find much to comfort it at St. Victor. These men dug shafts and tunnels, they did not open foundations and sink wells down to living streams.
Adam of St. Victor, as I have said, lived in those days, and they produced their natural effect upon his mind and upon his writings. He died somewhere between 1172 and 1192; and while he was celebrated as the expositor of St. Jerome’s prefaces to the books of the Bible, and was known as the composer of “sequences, rhythms, and other writings,” his fame rests upon his modern rediscovery by Monsieur Gautier. The history of the preservation of his hymns is itself a suggestive commentary on the difficulties of Latin hymnology, and so I give it entire.
Clichtove, a Flemish theologian of the period between 1500 and 1550, undertook to help his brethren to comprehend the offices of the Church. His Elucidatorium Ecclesiasticum was first published in Paris in 1515, and then at Basle in 1517 and 1519. There were four subsequent editions—that of Paris (1556) being the best, and that of Cologne (1732) being the latest. Now this book was the great mine for Latin hymns before Daniel, Trench, Mone, Königsfeld, March, and others made them accessible. And of Adam of St. Victor he gives thirty-six specimens, which were supposed to be all that had remained, with one or two possible exceptions.
In 1855 J. P. Migne published in his Patrologiae Cursus, in volume 196, these thirty-six hymns of Adam of St. Victor. Archbishop Trench, who is such an admirer of our poet, has doubtless been indebted to the many helpful Latin notes, with which the excellent editor of the Patrologia has enriched the obscurity of his author. At least so it seems to a person who compares Trench’s own notes with that Latin.
Monsieur Gautier, however, determined to look further, the result being that he published the Oeuvres Poetiques d’ Adam de St. Victor in 1858 at Paris. This gives us one hundred and six hymns—of which Trench says that some of them were well known but anonymous; and others are strictly new, and fully equal to his best compositions. From this source, then, the two great admirers of Adam of St. Victor—Archbishop Trench and Dr. Neale—have drawn their originals.
I am not surprised that theologians should enjoy such a poet as Adam. He is so terse, so dialectically subtle, so metaphysically accurate, so allegorically copious. In a line he often makes a reference which his editor struggles to catch in a foot-note a page long. And you must comprehend the reference in order to comprehend the poem! As I read the eulogy of Trench, I find him saying that when we remember Adam of St. Victor’s theologic lore, his frequent and admirable use of Scripture, his art and variety in versification, his “skill in conducting a story,” and his own personal feeling which permeates his poems, we must put him “foremost among the sacred Latin poets of the Middle Ages.” Dr. Neale, too, calls him “the greatest of mediaeval poets.” And so, “what shall he do that cometh after the King?” For, in spite of this mighty commendation, and in spite of the praise which these didactic hymns have obtained, we cannot and do not sing any of them. Even Dr. Neale cannot make them singable, though he would probably do it if he could.
I must confess—and take the risk of being charged with stupidity and ignorance—that I cannot place Adam of St. Victor where they have set him. Southey’s ballads and poems are legion, as we know, and they are learned beyond all cavilling; but they will not live like the two or three little things of Motherwell. And Adam’s vast congeries of sequences, composed for all the saints and festivals of the calendar, cannot stand an instant against the sweetness of Bernard of Clairvaux, or the grandeur of Peter Damiani’s judgment hymn. These others, it is true, wrote less, but they wrote subjectively, and hence they appealed to the heart of the Christian in every age. For verse alone, however skilful, is not poetry; and the celebration of saints and angels, however beautifully accomplished, ministers nothing to “a mind diseased.” We need to feel a genius which kindles its watch-fire in the line of signal—as did Helena’s watchers between Jerusalem and Constantinople. Then, as this flame flares up into the night, we know that it speaks to us of the discovery of the true cross.
I am thus compelled to dissent from the cultus which has grown up about this brilliant, epigrammatic, and altogether admirable Adam. For he attracts by his obscurity and he surprises by his intricacy; and the interest excited is that of the scholar and of the translator, rather than that of the popular approval of the Christians of to-day. And I am glad to support this opinion, not merely by the rather caustic comment of Professor March, but by the word of Mrs. Charles, where she speaks of “his elaborate system of Scriptural types occasionally chilling the genuine fire of his verse into a catalogue of images.” And I must add, for my own justification, that this “fire” is the fire of the orator, and not altogether that of the poet. It is objective and not subjective; for though there be two kinds of poetry in the world, we cannot doubt which kind it is that “permanently pleases and takes commonly with all classes of men”—for this was Aristotle’s unequalled definition.
It is time that we should take a glance at this laureate of St. Victor, whose monumental plate of copper remained, down to the date of the first Revolution, near the door of the choir in that ancient cloister. The epitaph upon it was mainly drawn from his own work. It breathes the same contempt of earth and derision of its vanities, which we find so common in that age.
“Vana salus hominis, vanus decor, omnia vana;
Inter vana nihil vanius est homine.”
“Vain is the welfare of man and his fashion, for all things are vanity;
And, in the midst of vanity, nothing is vainer than man.”
It was a later hand than his own which, after selecting those ten lines from Adam’s own writings, added four very inferior verses to complete the inscription. These state that:
“I who lie here, the unfortunate and wretched (miser et miserabilis) Adam, ask one prayer as my highest reward: I have sinned; I confess; I seek pardon; spare the contrite. Spare me, father; spare me, brethren; spare me, God.”
He was born in Brittany, to the best of our information. He studied in Paris, and finally entered the walls of St. Victor, never to leave it. It is a very brief record, but it illustrates the monotony and dead sameness of that mediaeval monastic life. The Dark Ages were mud-flats, from which the tide had gone out. And yet I think that Adam of St. Victor had another side to him, which Trench and Neale might well have developed—a power of livelier rhythm than is often suspected. The little stranded fish perchance gambolled a trifle in its small sea-water pool.
The poem which I quote is found in Migne and Gautier. It differs from another sequence upon a similar theme—one which Dr. Neale has translated. It is “The Praise of the Cross.”
This poem, it will be seen, is abrupt, irregular, and altogether inferior, in some features, to the usually finished and elegant diction of its author. For this very reason I have selected it; it exhibits Adam of St. Victor when he dashes off the stanzas without revision, fired by the glow of his theme. Only on this account do I render it, trying merely to carry its dash and spirit into the English version.
Salve, Crux, arbor
Vitae praeclara.
Vexillum Christi,
Thronus et ara.
O Crux, profanis
Terror et ruina,
Tu Christianis
Virtus es divina
Salus et victoria.
Tu properantis
Contra Maxentium
Tu praeliantis
Juxta Danubium
Constantini gloria.
Favens Heraclio
Perdis cum filio
Chosroe profanum.
In hoc salutari
Ligno gloriari
Decet Christianum.
Crucis longum, latum,
Sublimè, profundum,
Sanctis propalatum
Quadrum salvat mundum
Sub quadri figura
Medicina vera.
Christus in statera
Crucis est distractus,
Pretiumque factus,
Solvit mortis jura.
Crux est nostrae
Libra justitiae
Sceptrum regis,
Virga potentiae.
Crux, coelestis
Signum victoriae.
Belli robur
Et palma gloriae.
Tu scala, tu vatis
Tu crux desperatis
Tabula suprema.
Tu de membris Christi
Decorem traxisti
Regum diadema.
Ter te nobis Crux beata
Crux, cruore consecrata
Sempiterna gaudia
Det superna gratia.
Amen!
Hail, thou Cross, splendid
Tree, of life’s own place;
Christ’s very standard,
Altar and throne-place.
Thou to the heathen
Ruin and terror;
Thou to the Christian
Bringing joy nearer—
Health and success!
Thou when Maxentius
Swiftly defied—
Thou when the Danube
Flowed at his side—
Gavest to Constantine
Glory no less!
Yea, and Heraclius’
Fight thou hast won
When the proud Chosroes
Fell, with his son.
So should a Christian tongue
Boast of the worth
Of this most wonderful
Tree of the earth.
This the true medicine
Of the whole land
Four-square and perfect
As it shall stand;
Four-square in breadth and height,
Depth and length, ever;
Shown to the saints of God,
Cure for life’s fever.
Christ in such balances,
Poised on the cross,
Maketh death lightest,
Saveth from loss!
Yea, the cross truly—
Justest of scales!—
For a king’s sceptre
And priest’s rod avails.
Cross thou art surely
Our heavenly sign,
Strength of our battle
And guerdon divine.
Ladder and life-raft
And plank on the wave—
Those that are drowning,
O cross, thou canst save!
Thou that hast carried
The Saviour of men,
Hadst the best honor
Of royalty, then.
Blessed cross, may there be given,
Through that blood, our way to heaven—
Unto us eternal place
Unto us celestial grace!
Adam’s peculiarities are very marked in this production. He alludes, as you perceive, to the Cross in the air which Constantine took as his sign in which to conquer. He refers to Chosroes, King of Persia, who, after great successes and the conquest of Jerusalem itself, was finally overcome by Heraclius, the Eastern Emperor, about 622-29 A.D.; and he also drags in a piece of mystical imagery about the “four-squareness” of the earth, which is hard enough to understand without a key. The key is one with many wards. It includes the “breadth, depth, length, and height” of the love of Christ; it suggests the appearance of the heavenly city of John’s vision; it reminds us of the temple in Ezekiel’s prophecy, and of the account of the actual structure in 1 Kings; it recalls the classical geographers’ notions about the shape of the earth and about the “four quarters,” which we still call east, west, north, south; it finally symbolizes all these things by the four arms of the Cross! Is it any wonder that Adam of St. Victor is a difficult poet to translate, and that his verses are not fitted to be sung?
Yet it must not be forgotten that the Heri mundus exultavit (St. Stephen’s Day) and the Veni, Creator Spiritus, Spiritus Recreator, are both his. Nor must it escape notice that Dr. Neale’s Mediaeval Hymns contains eleven versions of Adam of St. Victor; while Dr. Washburn, Chancellor Benedict, and other translators have quite made the old schoolman’s “sequences” and “proses” familiar to the most careless eye. Recently also we have the three volumes of Mr. Digby S. Wrangham (London, 1881) in which our poet is translated entire, the Latin and English being placed upon opposite pages. He has attained such an eminence as Drummond of Hawthornden, who has come back to us because he knew Ben Jonson and had kept and stratified the spirit of his age.
To me the man is always fascinating, always suggestive. He appears to challenge the best that we moderns can do. His very terseness is a defiance. And here, in this strange symmetry, I fancy that I see the alertness and skill of that wise insect which takes hold with her hands in kings’ palaces. The web of this precise and unvarying artisan often sparkles with the morning dew of a pure devotion. The lines and stays and braces and fashioning of these illustrious verses are as accurate as the spider’s spinning. I look up toward the light and, yonder, upon some Corinthian capital of the song of songs—or over there in a corner of the gate called Beautiful through which Ezekiel walks—or again, high amid the wisdom of that Solomon’s Porch of the Apocalypse where stands the serene John—there I see how Adam of St. Victor has stretched his web. And if, now and then, some dead fly of an obscure allusion, or some desiccated bit of monasticism, offends the sight, I strive to think only of the art that has spread the fabric—and God’s glorious sunshine brightens, upon His own temple, His little creature’s toil!