The Latin Hymn-writers and Their Hymns

by Samuel Willoughby Duffield

UPON HIS EXILE.

Once I was rich and blessed with friends beyond measure,

And, for awhile, Fortune was prosperous too.

You would have said that the gods had heard my petition,

And that success had taught me to conquer anew.

Often I said to myself: “What means this wealthy condition?

What does it claim, this swift great store of my gain?”—

Woe to myself! for faith and confidence perish;

Even my property teaches how I have heaped it in vain!

Lightly the wing sweeps men and the things that they cherish,

And from the highest station ruin pours down to the plain.

What you possess to-day, perchance you will lose by to-morrow,

Or, indeed, as you speak, it ceases perhaps to be yours.

These are the tricks of our fate; and haughtiest kings to their sorrow,

And humblest slaves shall find that no future endures.

Lo, what is Man! and what has he right to inherit?

What is the thing that his wretchedness claims as its own?

This, this only is man; the years press down on his spirit

Always in saddest condition to utter his final groan.

It is man’s lot to have nothing—in nakedness coming; and going

Back to his mother’s breast to bear her no riches again.

It is man’s lot to decay, his dust on the desert bestowing,

And by sad steps to climb to the pyre of his pain.

Such is his heirship of good, and here upon earth he may gather

Nothing more certain than these, the spoils of a vanishing fate.

Riches and honor may greet him, yea, be his servants the rather;

Wealthy at morn though his station, poor shall at night be his state.

Nor can a man discern the permanent law of possession

Save as he seeks to discover the nature of mortal affairs.

Yet does God give them their law, conferring them through his concession

Unto the weak by his grace; and their going and coming he shares.

He by himself alone provides for and manages solely,

Nor does he doubt to provide nor vary in management still.

For what he sees to be done he does, and his ruling is wholly

Laborless, fixing the form and the time and the bounds of his will.

Yea, through his zeal for our growth he places our limits and changes

These by his occult laws, himself remaining the same.

Himself remaining the same, while sickness and health he arranges,

Swaying the world and showing how hope must be set on his name.

If it be right to trust thee, then, all that thou doest or takest

He is behind it, O Fortune, and he is the source of thy strength.

Nay, I affirm, O Fortune, however thou fixest or shakest

Thou canst not grieve me, nor overmuch cheer me at length.

He is almighty and tender, the concord and trust of my treasure;

I shall be his forever, when all his purpose is through!

It may perhaps be well for us to observe the characteristics of Hildebert as we discover them in his hymn. They will be found to be those of an oratorical repetition, and indeed of that “fatal octosyllabic” fluency, demonstrated in later times by Skelton, by Butler, and by Scott. To a certain degree the verse is incapable of anything large or exultant. But it is admirable for the purpose to which he puts it. Indeed, I knew no better way, when Hildebert’s best admirer passed from this to a nobler world, than to express my own sadness in similar Latin; and I venture to close this chapter with the closing lines of that tribute. Mr. E. C. Benedict made it his happiest recreation to turn the strains of these ancient singers into modern verse. And it seemed fitting that he should be commemorated in the very rhythm he loved so well:

“Vir honeste, vir praeclare!

Tibi quidvis possim dare

His versiculis confeci;

Hic, coronam superjeci.

Autem, illic, lux perennis

Proferet floresque pennis

Aves pictis puro die;—

Nihil deest, O tu pie!

Tu qui terra serus abis

Christum unice laudabis.

Vale! quia non moraris;

Ave! quia nunc laetaris!”

---

“Unto thee sincere and worthy

Here I bring a tribute earthy.

In these verses I have pressed it;

Here upon thy tomb I rest it.

But thyself, in light eternal

Seest flowers; and birds supernal

Brightly flit through sunny portals—

Thou dost lack no joy of mortals!

Thou who late from us dost sever

There shall praise the Lord forever!

Farewell! for thou wilt not linger;

Hail! for thou art there a singer!”

Yes, when once these old monks “soared beyond chains and prison”—when they dreamed by night and talked by day of the land that is very far off—they drew to them all loving hearts from the most distant ages. Doubtless Hildebert knew—and rejoiced in knowing—that his aspirations had been caught in a modern city and by a weary lawyer, who found rest and peace in their strain. And doubtless in the perfectness of the present rejoicing they both see and love what they once sighed to obtain.

CHAPTER XVIII.
BERNARD OF CLAIRVAUX.

There is no lack of material for a copious account of Bernard of Clairvaux. He was a man to become distinguished in any age of the world, and he took and maintained the highest place of his time. His faults are as patent as his virtues. But, if he had not these faults, he would never have enjoyed certain kinds of success. His very austerity was a merit when it held his keen intellect steadily to its mark. And his intolerance, narrowness, ambition, and love of dialectics, were themselves a part of the great demand which his generation made upon him.

I shall be responsible here simply for a condensation and compilation of facts, a very different proceeding from that which is usually needed. In the case of almost all these hymn-writers the materials are so slight and meagre as to require large research; in this case one is overwhelmed with riches. I do not profess to say how many lives of Bernard have been written, but I know of a goodly number; and no history of his time has failed to give attention to so prominent a figure in religion and in statecraft.

He was singularly situated in point of time and place. Born in Burgundy, not far from Dijon, of a fighting family, who owned a castle and were well represented in the wars, he saw the light in 1091. His father Tesselin was a man who had learned in the school of Christ to be more careful not to wrong his neighbor than not to be wronged by him. His mother Alith was the model chatelaine of the times, full of kindness to the poor and helpfulness to the needy. He was born at the omphalos and centre of the Middle Ages. Peter the Hermit whirled along his wild battalions almost beside his very cradle. The little lad of four years must have seen the strange excited throngs, with their red crosses and their banners, and in the dust of their passing and in the chants of their praise, he must have been conscious of a certain enthusiasm which was to run throughout his life.

For several years this news was to men the staple of all conversation. The body of their own duke was finally brought back from Palestine to his ancient heritage, and laid, by his own desire, in the cemetery of the poor monks of Citeaux. There, in this comparatively recent monastery near Dijon, he had selected his last home, in preference to many more opulent and renowned establishments. The son of Burgundy’s vassal Tesselin beheld this and other incidents. His brothers went to the wars with the next duke, but he himself grew less and less inclined toward such pursuits. Books formed his world. His cell was afterward said to be stored with them; and he obtained easily the credit of being the best instructed person of his time in the Bible and in the works of the fathers of the Church.

And already these tendencies were aroused in the youth of eighteen or nineteen years who had begun the old-fashioned austerities on his own account. We are not surprised to find him neck-deep in ice-water; stung into intellectual vigor by the recent victory of Abelard over William of Champeaux; aroused into an actual preaching fervor, in which he denounces the sins of the age; continually mindful of his dead mother Alith’s prayers, and finally resolved upon entering the monastic order and upon carrying all his friends and relations with him.

That singular mastery of other minds, which was his at every period henceforth, now displayed itself. It did not matter that his brother Guido had a wife and family; nor that his brother Gerard loved to fight a good deal better than he loved to pray. Into the cloister they must go! Gerard indeed was something after the manner of Lot’s wife, disposed to look back. But his brother touched him on the side, and by some strange prescience or happy guess, predicted to him a spear-wound, which actually happened. On being thus remarkably warned, the soldier relented as they carried him wounded off the field, and cried, “I turn monk, monk of Citeaux.” This was the Gerard over whom, long afterward, Bernard delivered that touching sermon, where he branched out from the Song of Solomon (1:5) to declare that this body “is not the mansion of the citizen, nor the house of the native, but either the soldier’s tent or the traveller’s inn;” and then poured forth his full heart in a tide of uncontrollable and lofty grief.

So the youth marched into the poor monastery of Citeaux, where scanty food, rough clothing, harsh surroundings and occasional epidemic disorders had nearly disheartened and broken up the company of monks. Stephen Harding, their English abbot, was proudly indifferent to all patronage; but he was not so blind as not to perceive that Bernard, with thirty captives of the bow and spear of his eloquence, was a valuable addition to a depleted community.

These Cistercians, then and always, were rigidists. Up they got at two in the morning to prayer and “matins;” and for full two hours were busy, in a cold dark chapel, over them. Then, with the first dawn of light, out again to “lauds.” Before this service, and after it, the monk’s time was fairly his own; but at two o’clock he dined, at nightfall he had “vespers,” and at six or eight (according to the season) came “compline,” and then immediately the dormitory and bed. Such was the life, with a little more of it on Sundays, and with sermons interspersed at intervals. There is no mention of breakfast or supper!

And in such a life the ecstatic, mystical character of Bernard rose into visions and prophecies. His body was nearly subjugated, and his taste, and, indeed, all his senses, appeared to have deserted him. He watched, he dug, he hewed and carried wood; he kept the very letter, and more than the letter of his monastic rule. And yet, as Morison acutely observes, this very abstraction from people and things gave him that delight in nature from which, so often in the future, he was to catch the illustration or the inspiration of his discourse. “Beeches and oaks,” he said, “had ever been his best teachers in the Word of God.”

But now Citeaux (suddenly become prosperous) must colonize; and who so fit to lead the swarm from the gates and found the new hive as this same Bernard? Into his hands Abbot Stephen puts the cross, and he and his twelve companions march solemnly across the interdicted boundaries of their little Cistercian home, and nearly a hundred miles to the northward. There he chooses a place which exhibits, as Bernard’s actions generally do, the far-sighted sagacity which takes mean and worthless matters and makes them what, with right handling, they are able to become. It is a valley—the “Valley of Wormwood.” It is grown up with underbrush and is a haunt of robbers. But here, with the river Aube winding down between the hills, with the hills themselves capable of culture, and with the future of this little vale revealed to his prophetic eye, he sets his cloister and calls it Clairvaux—“Fair Valley,” or “Brightdale.”

I wish that I could quote the beautiful picture that Vaughan (Hours with the Mystics, Book V., chap. 1) has given of this fine enterprise. We should see Bernard and his monks chopping and binding fagots; planting vines and trees of goodly fruit; rearing their cloistral buildings, when the time arrived, out of the very materials about them, and so steadily transforming purgatory into paradise. There should we see the river bending its great shoulders to the wheels that drive fulling-mill and grist-mill; or toiling for them in their tannery, or filling their caldarium. We should see the monks at vintage or at harvest; pressing the clusters from yonder hill, or gathering the hay from yonder meadow. And everywhere throughout this busy, energetic life, we should behold the wasted figure of their chief—austere, sincere, severe. And we should feel that unaccountable personality—that intrinsic, magnetic, controlling quality which made this the man above all others to be the opposer of schismatics, the counsellor of kings, the establisher of popes, and the preacher of the Second Crusade. Clairvaux was his kingdom, and from Clairvaux he ruled the mediaeval world.

His personal appearance was in keeping with this idea—it was the evident cause of an evident effect. He was taller than the middle height and exceedingly thin. His complexion was “clear, transparent, red-and-white;” and always he had some color in his wasted face. His beard was reddish, and—according to his ancestral derivation, called Sorus or “yellow-haired”—his own hair was light and perhaps tawny. This beard grows whiter in the course of years, and these hollow cheeks glow with the enthusiasm of the orator as he speaks. Then he is at his best! He flings aside all feebleness; he disregards every consideration except the truth; he flashes and glitters as the tremendous squadrons of his brilliant logic, or still more brilliant exhortation, press down upon the listening soul. He had indeed a perfect confidence in himself, in his methods, and in his ultimate success. He was like a modern ocean steamer, iron-hulled, steam-driven, sharp-prowed, cutting through all storms without detention, and riding the wildest waves in his triumphant course to victory.

There is in Bernard of Clairvaux a most singular combination of the dreamer and the man of affairs. Vaughan has too admirably condensed the story of these interruptions and occupations, for me to avoid quoting, at least this much, from his capital monograph:

“Struggling Christendom,” he says, “sent incessant monks and priests, couriers and men-at-arms to knock and blow horns at the gate of Clairvaux Abbey; for Bernard, and none but he, must come out and fight that audacious Abelard; Bernard must decide between rival popes, and cross the Alps, time after time, to quiet tossing Italy; Bernard alone is the hope of fugitive Pope and trembling Church; he only can win back turbulent nobles, alienated people, recreant priests, when Arnold of Brescia is in arms at Rome, and when Catharists, Petrobrusians, Waldenses and heretics of every shade, threaten the hierarchy on either side the Alps; and at the preaching of Bernard the Christian world pours out to meet the disaster of a new crusade.”

Yet with all this he is a profound scholar, and his comments on Scripture are of a mystical, and often of a serenely spiritual and thoughtful kind, as though no intrusion could jar the harmony and poise of his soul. His was that strange contradiction of nature which found its calm in tumult and its ecstasy in conflict. Obstructions pass away.

Like that later mystic, Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), there are no hindrances in his communion with the unseen world; he could, perhaps, do as Novalis did when Sophie Kühn died. For the poor fellow records in his diary: “Much noise in the house. I went to her grave and had a few wild moments of joy.” And of him also Just declares: “No spirit-dream was too high, no business detail too low;” for Novalis in 1799 was “Assessor and Law-adviser to the Salt Mines of Thuringia.” Pegasus in harness appears no worse a contradiction than a mystic in a salt-pan, or a Bernard epistolizing the Count of Champagne about a drove of stolen pigs.

Prose and poetry, poetry and prose! And yet the brain and soul that can do good work in the one are by no means disqualified for the other; and your truest mystics are not likely to wear long hair and talk raving nonsense among impractical neologists. For Bernard, even though he made converts wherever he went, and drew increasing numbers into cloister walls, exerted a potent and prevalent influence upon his time. He is one of the lighthouses, as we sail down the coast of the Middle Ages; and not until we pass him and his compeers, do the real darkness and the dull ignorance, the shoals and the unmarked rocks appear, ready to wreck the ventures of the mind. How gladly one would linger over these fascinating incidents in this remarkable career! The man’s life was expressed in some of his own aphorisms. They are such as these:

“There is no truer wretchedness than a false joy.” “He does not please who pleases not himself.” “You will give to your voice the voice of virtue if you have first persuaded yourself of what you would persuade others.” “Hold the middle line unless you wish to miss the true method.”

These are the maxims of an orator as well as of a statesman. And the junction of imagination, analysis, logic, fervor, and faith, made this man what he was. Already he had tried his wings in preaching to his own monks at morning and evening; and they had listened to him as though he had come from another world. He dealt with the great and vital questions of the moral nature. Like the best of our modern preachers, he aimed to sustain the soul, to arouse and to cheer it, and to bid it press forward to a victory which he himself foresaw. He might have said of such aspiring saints as surrounded him what Roscoe says:

“I see, or the glory blinds me

Of a soul divinely fair,

Peace after great tribulation

And victory hung in the air.”

He felt, with Lacordaire, that the Gospel had a new meaning, when he discovered that it was intended for the comfort of the human heart. He was at one with his monks; and as he reached out toward the social life about him, and toward the turbid torrents of politics and ecclesiasticism over which he must throw the bridge of charity or of faith, he simply transferred the Clairvaux method into the affairs of men.

It was an age of destruction, and into it he was casting the salt of the Gospel, hoping at least to make it salvable. Around his life needless legends and superstitious traditions have combined to cluster, but the real Bernard is distinct from both. He never relaxed his grip upon himself or upon others. And while this is not yet the place to speak of the famous controversy with Abelard, it may be properly said that Bernard saw tendencies in that philosophy which were genuinely dangerous; and that he defeated them because truth (however narrow and selfishly employed) is always stronger than error. Such was also his power in preaching the crusade in 1145, when he was about fifty-five years of age. It sprang from the quenchless fire of his zeal, as when at Vezelai, standing by the side of Louis VII., he caused such enthusiasm in the crowd beneath, that he did nothing so long as he remained in the town but make crosses for them to wear in sign of their holy purpose.

He had lived to see the Knights Templars, which had received his own especial approval, become one of the most famous orders on the globe. The Knights Hospitallers had been incorporated in 1113, and the Templars were founded in 1118 by Hugo de Paganis and others. But in 1128, at the Council of Troyes, there were but nine of them, all told, to keep their vow of “chastity, obedience, and poverty,” to “guard the passes and roads against robbers,” and to “watch over the safety of pilgrims.” Hugo then appealed to Bernard, and by his influence the council recognized this weak thing, destined so soon to be a mighty force, and which combined two of the strongest of our instincts—that to fight and that to pray. And now as in his old age he saw the corruption which was creeping into it and into other agencies on which his heart had been set, he relaxed no atom of his vigilance. He had seen the failure of his crusade, but it did not much affect him. His thoughts were now of heaven, and his watching was that he might be prepared to enter its gates. His principal friends had all died; Suger, in 1150, Theobald of Champagne, in 1152, and Pope Eugenius, his loved disciple, in 1153.

It was in this year that Bernard also made himself ready to go. On January 12th he said the Lord’s Prayer, and then, raising up what his admirers were wont to call his “dove-like” eyes, he prayed that God’s will might be done. And so, quietly and peacefully, he passed away. He has left behind him much as an ecclesiast, but more as a poet. I hold Bernard to be the real author of the modern hymn—the hymn of faith and worship. The poetry of Faber, which is now so near to the heart of the Church, is peculiarly in this key. The Salve Caput cruentatum came to us through Paul Gerhardt, and has become (through the translation of Dr. J. W. Alexander, a man of kindred spirit with Bernard) our

“O sacred head, now wounded.”

Gerhardt’s own hymn-writing—the most efficient, except Luther’s, in the German tongue—is wonderfully affected by Bernard. The Jesu dulcis memoria was rendered by Count Zinzendorf and became famous among those spiritual souls, the Moravians. And Edward Caswell’s translations—as I have already noticed—are supremely fine in spirit and in expression. I shall not attempt here what has been so capitally done already. The Church universal has made Bernard her own; and the very translations of his verses have been half-inspired. And while we sing,

“Jesus, the very thought of thee

With sweetness fills my breast,”

we shall sing “with the spirit and with the understanding,” the very strain that the Abbot of Clairvaux was sent on earth to teach! They canonized him in 1174—but it is better to have written a song for all saints than to be found in any breviary.

CHAPTER XIX.
ABELARD.

From the foreground of the waving banners and the flashing arms of the Crusaders, of the dark throng of the chanting monks, and of feudal pageantry and glitter—and from that background of dead uniformity which equally characterized those mediaeval times—emerges a figure unique and notable. It is that of a man in the prime and pride of life—lofty in stature, handsome in face, captivating in address. He is already a tried debater and an unsurpassed logician. He has Aristotle at the tip of his tongue; he has read much and thought a little, and his ambition is great.

Such a man came one day into the lecture hall of William of Champeaux at Paris. It was in the early part of the twelfth century, and William was the most celebrated teacher of the period, his “doctrine of universals” being accepted almost as though it were inspired. But this morning, while the master lectured and the disciples drank in his words without criticism or debate, the visitor stirred uneasily in his place. When the lecture closed he availed himself of the usual freedom to ask some questions. To William’s dogmatic answers the stranger in his turn proposed shrewd difficulties. It was no longer the harmony of teacher and taught, but the clash of two rival minds maintaining opposite systems of logic. And in that short struggle William the Archdeacon went down before the free lance of Peter Abelard, the rustic challenger from Palais (Le Pallet) in Brittany. And from that agitation went out the widening circles whose story we are now to note, and whose latest ripples break faintly on a tomb in Père-la-Chaise visited by thousands of modern tourists. Few tales are sadder or more suggestive.

The name of Abelard is variously spelled. It appears in divers authorities as Abelard, Abaelard, Abaielardus, Abailard, Abaillard, Abelhardus, and Abeillard. The true name (on the authority of Ch. de Rémusat) was, however, not Abelard, but Beranger or Berenger; and the future controversialist was christened Pierre or Peter. His birthplace is near Nantes, the house being represented a few years ago by a square brier-grown ruin back of the church. The date of his birth is given as 1079—a period when the world was feudal and military. But this lad was born for debate and not for battle. It may even be seriously doubted if he ever possessed much physical courage of a sort to stand the rough shock of actual warfare. He preferred the method of those who intermeddle among metaphysical subtleties to those who must keep sword edges sharp and armor furbished. His delight was to dispute, to be engaged in undertakings

“Whose chief devotion lies

In odd perverse antipathies;

In falling out with that or this

And finding somewhat still amiss.”

In those days not to be a warrior was to be—almost of compulsion—a monk. But Abelard’s independence forbade the second as his disputatious spirit had forbidden the first. He would neither risk his neck in the wars nor his opinions in the cloister. Instead of these he preferred the irregular combats of the scholar, and Bayle—with a touch of poetry—beholds him as he comes shining out of Brittany “darting syllogisms on every side.” Such was Peter Abelard—vain, handsome, opinionated, bound to swear by no master, a mighty voice crying in the desert of the Dark Ages for “free speech and free thought.”

The expedition to Paris hurt neither his reputation nor his purse. He arrived at perihelion as quickly as a comet. William of Champeaux—having first pushed him off and forced him to lecture on his own account at Melun and Corbeil—found that he returned like a cork thrust under water. The man’s buoyant, aggressive self-reliance, not to say self-conceit, was never contented with an inferior place. And while Alberic and Littulf and some of the older and more staid of his pupils held with William, it was plain that the popular favor inclined to the other side. The younger men were all for Abelard. The “doctrine of universals” was exploded as if with some of Friar Bacon’s “villainous saltpetre,” and doubtless the loss was small enough to mankind. His principal fort being taken, there was nothing left for the opposing general but a masterly retreat. Hence, by a convenient arrangement, combining several advantages, Guillaume des Champeaux became Bishop of Chalons-sur-Marne. And it was, of course, beneath the dignity of a bishop to hold lectures or to engage in logical controversies!

But, as generally happens, a sand-bag substitute was put in the bishop’s place; and Abelard came back to open a school on Mt. St. Genevieve and to bombard this professor. The battle was short and decisive, for the next we learn of this nameless champion of a defeated cause, he is absolutely enrolled as a humble follower of the great logician. This is but a fair sample of the general success which attended the new ideas. Everywhere they gained currency, attracting inquiry, arousing envy, awaking ecclesiastical suspicion, and inflaming the hatred of his defeated opponents.

About this time of inception and premonition, say 1113, Abelard undertook to examine the instruction given by William’s teacher, Anselm of Laon, who there vegetated as dean of the cathedral church. We must not confuse his name with that of the great Archbishop of Canterbury, whose method and science have outlasted the most of his contemporaries, and whom Neander styles “the Augustine of the twelfth century.” Had he been the teacher and Abelard the pupil, history might have made a different record. A profounder and a more reverent line of thought might have affected the acute and daring mind of the rising dialectician. And, above every other consideration, the new philosophy might have contained those elements of religion whose absence neutralized for centuries that wholesome independence which held mere dogmatism cheap as compared to the sacred light of truth. It would, indeed, have been well if such an Anselm had been at Laon, but the dean was a weak and futile person. And so it was inevitable that Abelard should again be in trouble and almost in disgrace, but even in his pathetic Historia Calamitatum the pupil did not forget to satirize his master. “He was that sort of a man,” he says, “that if any went to him being uncertain he returned more uncertain still.... When he lit a fire he filled his house with smoke, but he did not brighten it with light.” He adds, sarcastically, that Anselm’s philosophy always suggested to his mind the story of the fig-tree that our Lord cursed because it bore plenty of leaves and no fruit.

Abelard himself, however, was a genuine educator, and many bishops and other ecclesiastics, with nineteen cardinals and two popes, came from the ranks of his pupils. He loved liberty, although he loved it to that extent to which his own will—and no other authority, human or divine—restricted it. In this he differed from Anselm of Canterbury, who loved liberty, not according to license but according to law. Mere freedom to inquire, to complain, or to theorize, does not invariably carry with it profitable results. And Abelard—whose very freedom was in itself a noble revelation to the shackled intellects of his age—committed the grave error of supposing that the sweep of a free hand would certainly give lines of beauty and forms of grace. Something deeper than the mere distaste of false opinions is needful for this. Art, meditation, truth—all must lie beneath the O of Giotto or the masterly strokes of Apelles. And our rhetorician would have done well to have confined himself to the Trivium—grammar, rhetoric, and dialectics. When he undertook theology he first quarrelled with Anselm of Laon, and next he encountered all Christendom and Bernard of Clairvaux. His was the fatal blunder of every “free inquirer” who forgets reverence, and who, in his pride of intellect, may likely fall as the angels fell. Surely no Lucifer ever plunged more swiftly down from heaven’s battlements than did poor Peter Abelard from the dizzy height of his sudden success.

This is no place to criticise his “system,” if system it can be properly called. The Sic et Non—“Yes and No”—his most famous work, is really a mere challenge. He quotes the Bible against the Fathers and the Fathers against the Bible, touching on deep tideways and bogs and quicksands which he never attempts to ford, fathom, or bridge. The Arians, Sabellians, Nestorians and Pelagians are resuscitated in these pages. He flings their doubts before us like a gauntlet cast into the arena of debate. One may choose which side he will take. Such a man, arising in the nineteenth century and claiming sympathy with Christianity, would be by some suspected as a secret enemy and his vanity would loosen his armor for the entrance of many a venomed shaft. His genuine ardor would be misunderstood and his opinions would be heavily attacked before they could deploy at their full strength. If this be true to-day how infinitely more true must it have been of an age narrower, more illiterate, and with an arm which wielded not in vain the sword of excision against heretics!

This, then, was the man who in the prime of manhood and at the topmost peak of prosperity found himself with money in his pocket, in Paris, and his own master. He had not yet said of the dogmas of Mother Church as Luther said of Tetzel, “By God’s help I will go down and beat a hole in your drum.” Hitherto he had safely kept to Aristotle—at once the blessing and the bane of Middle-Age reasoners—and he had the vainglorious sense that five thousand students hung breathless on his words. He considered himself upon the firmest footing that one could desire, and behold, he fell!

The “damned spot” of Abelard’s character is that which, after all, has insured his fame. And, since it is indispensable, a few sentences must exhibit it in its repulsive ugliness. Fortunately, or unfortunately, we do not need the help of any other biographer than his own bitter soul. His Historia Calamitatum is the sufficient history. In this he tells us that his life had been previously irreproachable and of the strictest moral correctness. Now, however, he began to “let himself go”—how far, or how fast, it is of no use for us to investigate. But Fulbert, the Canon of the Cathedral of Notre Dame, had a perfect Hypatia for a niece, and to this lady Abelard’s gaze was turned.

She was eighteen, and there was an irresistible charm about her, as of some fragrant white lily. She was a woman fit to lend grace and beauty to prosaic surroundings. And Abelard has the unspeakable audacity to declare that he, a man of thirty-eight, deliberately selected this pure and perfect flower and meant to take it for himself. Not to marry; for the truth demands that we should perceive his own thorough appreciation of the fact that marriage would sink him out of the ranks of scholars into those of tradesmen and would be the death-blow to his ambition. Not to marry; for it was a bad age, and sin sometimes clothed itself in the cowl of the monk and the robe of the prelate, and such a sin was better forgiven than such a blunder. Let all contemporaneous history bear witness! For every account of the lives of Heloise and Abelard reveals the impossibility of passing these unpleasant facts without notice or comment. On this pivot turns the golden world of that deathless love.

So the avaricious Fulbert took Abelard to dwell in his own house, and gave his niece’s education entirely into his care, and, as her teacher himself expresses it, delivered her “like a lamb to a hungry wolf.”

Heloise was probably the better educated of the two. She was the child of unknown parents. Bayle asserts that she was the daughter of a priest, and his facilities and laboriousness respecting such abstruse particulars no one will question. The authority from which he is possibly quoting, says that this priest was John “Somebody” (nescio cujus) and a canon of the same cathedral with Fulbert at Paris. Doubtless the trace of her ancestry is utterly lost to us beyond these meagre items. Even Fulbert’s alleged relationship has been questioned. But the scholarship of Heloise speaks for itself in a terse, sparkling Latin style, which is as pleasant beside Abelard’s lumbering sentences as a bright mountain brook beside a turbid and turbulent stream. Count de Bussy-Rabutin—no mean critic—has put on record that he never read more elegant Latin. She also understood Greek and Hebrew, with neither of which, strange to say, was Abelard acquainted. And at first blush it would seem that the teacher should have been the pupil.

Absolute justice requires that the ugly and disgraceful slurs in the Historia Calamitatum, and even in the correspondence, should not be overlooked. Here is what will serve for a fair example. He says of her, Quae cum per faciem non esset infima, per abundantiam litterarum erat suprema—while she was not exactly the worst-looking of them, she was the best educated; and therefore he selected her! The spretae injuria formae never went further than this. But this is by no means the solitary instance of that low snarl in which the currish nature of the Breton rustic now and then indulged.

What, then, could have been the spell by which this charming woman drew Christendom after her? Popes and bishops called her “beloved daughter,” priests entitled her “sister,” and all laymen laid claim to her as “mother.” If she were not so beautiful as some authorities positively state, she must certainly have been marvellously captivating. But chiefest of her many graces was her crowning loyalty and love. It showed itself in perfect sympathy, in entire self-devotion. Michelet, indeed, has observed that the legend of Abelard and Heloise is all that has survived in France out of the story of the Middle Ages.

Nor has the unanimity of literary judgment upon these lovers been less remarkable than the interest which they have inspired. With one voice Abelard is condemned and with one voice Heloise is extolled. “She was,” says a brilliant writer, “a great, heroic woman, one of those formed out of the finest clay of humanity.” “With the Grecian fire,” says another, “she had the Roman firmness.” And even the rude picture which the mechanical touch of Alexander Pope has painted, leaves to us in the “Epistle of Heloise” a trace of the same beauty, and affords one line—

“And graft my love immortal on thy fame”—

which only needs to be reversed in order to be prophetic. Morison’s tribute is both nobler and more acute, for he testifies, “She walked through life with ever-reverted glances on the glory of her girlish love.” It was the same thought which Dante—after Boethius—puts into the lips of Francesca—

“There is no greater sorrow

Than to be mindful of the happy time

In misery, and that thy Teacher knows.”

Nay, it is even the very cameo out of Tennyson:

“As when a soul laments, which hath been blessed,

Desiring what is mingled with past years,

In yearnings that can never be expressed

By sighs, or groans, or tears.”

This is the heart which Abelard won. Winning it he won, and forever held, the woman whose it was. From that moment she merged her whole existence in his with a complete and utter abandonment of self, to the perfectness of which let her epistles from the Paraclete bear testimony. Across this story of undeviating devotion Abelard’s vanity, pride, and coarseness are written with smears and stains, like an illiterate monk who blots his comments upon a precious missal full of saints and angels. For, first of his offences, he revealed this love of his by really becoming a troubadour. He composed verses in the Romance tongue, recounting their loves, and set them to such stirring tunes that all the world was soon singing them. Hence grew the legend that the “Romance of the Rose” (Roman de la Rose) was his composition. It undoubtedly contains their story, but it was not his work; it belongs to William de Loris and Jean de Meung. But, as for Heloise, she was delighted. What would have been a crown of sorrow to other women was to her a crown of joy. She even announced to Abelard “with the utmost exultation” the advent of that unhappy being christened Astrolabe and destined to pass his forsaken and lonely existence shut up in a cloister. That people sang of this love; that it went to the ends of the earth; that nothing could prevent its being known—these were the happinesses of Heloise. Of the merit of the songs we cannot ourselves decide. They were originally anonymous, and only those familiar with the crabbed French of that period may hope to find them again.

Meanwhile, though the lectures suffered, and the students saw, and all Paris smiled, Fulbert was totally in the dark. This condition of affairs was predestined to come to an end, and it came in storm and anger. Abelard saw himself forced, against his will, to marry secretly. It was a sting to his egotism that ever rankled. It served, though, to pacify Fulbert and the rest of the relations; and being too glad and too loose-tongued to keep this handsome alliance from the public they presently told everybody. Heloise, thereupon, fearing for Abelard’s ambitious schemes, did not shrink from a point-blank falsehood. She denied the marriage. She had been in Brittany and was now at Argenteuil, of which she was by and by to become the abbess. And she added to her denial the self-abnegating sentiment that Abelard, who was created for all mankind, ought not to be sacrificed by “bondage to a woman.” It was worthy of her who so admired the “philosophic Aspasia,” and whose tutor and lover had done what he could to make her as “free from superstition” as himself. Her moral ideas were what he taught her, and he could not unteach them.

Among the complaisant and agreeable nuns of Argenteuil she now resided. It was but a few miles from Paris. Her husband frequently went thither, and in a short time thereafter she was enrolled as a novice. The fact aroused her relatives, and their mutterings became ominous; Fulbert, especially, taking this act in high dudgeon, as though it meant the premeditated repudiation of his niece. Their anger did not stop at words, but, knowing Abelard’s popularity, and fearing to attack him during the day, they bribed his valet and assaulted him by night in his own apartment.

It was this blow which flung Abelard from heaven to hell. His hitherto impregnable attitude; his fierce zeal for his opinions; his hopes of a new philosophy which should make his name immortal, all vanished before it as spider-webs break before a sword. And when, conscious that he was no more a god and a hero, but an insulted and defeated man, he rose from his bed of pain, the prospect was not improved. The outpoured indignation of bishops and canons and clergy—the lamentations of the women and the students—did not appease him. A whisper was in his soul like that of Haman’s wife. Mordecai, the despised, was coming to the kingdom and the Agagite was doomed.

There were reasons which led him to think of seeking aid from the Pope against his enemies. But Fulk of Deuil, his good friend, advised him not to try it. “You have no money,” said honest, plain spoken Fulk, “and what can you do at Rome without money?” It was bitter truth. Yet the Abbé Migne, forgetting the much worse things Bernard had said of the Roman Curia in the treatise De Consideratione, exscinds the passage from Fulk’s letter on the ground that it would cause “scandal to Catholic ears.” Edification first, truth afterward, if at all!

Therefore, with a poisoned soul, he sought the Abbey of St. Denis to hide himself from the gaze of the world. To a man so proud a life without imperial power was a living death. Yet from those walls he issues his edict that Heloise shall take the veil. His vanity led him to carry out the original cause of hostility even to its unalterable result. But Heloise, whatever she might have thought or felt, marched with lofty resignation to her fate. Quoting aloud—as his confession pitifully recalls—the words of Cornelia to Pompey from the “Pharsalia” of Lucan, she takes the vows. Never was there less of religion in such a ceremony! Henceforth she walks like the moon in distant brightness, coming to meet us down the ages as comes the Queen Louise of Gustav Richter’s superb picture. She is transfigured by her self-forgetting love, and “all that is left of her,” in the best and truest sense, is now “pure womanly.”

For Abelard at St. Denis the case was different. He found the monks worldly and dissolute and he reproved them. The effect was similar to the case of Lot—the reformer departed with all his belongings. He then renewed his old lectures. His scholars followed him to Maisoncelle, where, in their avidity of knowledge, they overcrowded every resource of shelter and food. He offered them that fascinating combination, dialectics and divinity. Like the saltpetre and the charcoal these were harmless when apart and explosive when together, particularly if you add the sulphurous heart which now smoked in his bosom. A harsh and vindictive tone was given to his disposition, and it was natural that he should be, at least tentatively, a heretic. These moral bruises are worse than any or all physical injuries; the man who has felt them can never be again what he was before. And now Anselm and William and Fulbert and everybody that he had bullied or taunted or threatened turned upon him. The gates to the black cavern of the winds were open and the blasts of fate were icy cold.

The papal legate Conan held a council at Soissons in 1121. The opinions of Abelard were received with disfavor. They humiliated the poor wretch among them and made him burn his own book, and then mumble through a credo amid his “sobs and sighs and tears.” These words are his own, and his is also the statement that he was put into the custody of the Abbot of St. Medard and there he was lectured, and even lashed by the convent whip, until he exhibited proper submission. Poetical justice had befallen him. For he confesses, to his shame, that he had coerced and even struck Heloise. Now he, too, was coerced, and he, too, was struck.

Then back again to St. Denis, with more hatred and hard speeches than ever. But Suger, the new abbot, an easy-going lover of bric-à-brac and good living, set him free, a “masterless man” past forty years of age, with Heloise out of reach and the spears of exultant enemies bristling in every hedge. Is it a wonder that he took to the banks of the Ardusson near Troyes, wattled himself a rude hut and resolved to be a hermit? But even there in the desert the people thronged him and built a village of huts about his own. His misfortunes became a portion of his strength. And there they erected for him a church and a cloister which he dedicated to the Paraclete, a daring innovation, since it was then considered highly heterodox thus to distinguish one person of the Trinity from the other two.

Under such storms and heat the nature of the man had been seriously warped. He became suspicious, gloomy, and weakly unstable. His correspondence with Heloise had been completely broken off. He went into the monotonous Champagne, then out into the bleak Brittany, and finally (1125) he received the abbacy of St. Gildas. His friends, perhaps, desired to save him from homelessness and so from the dangers which the relentless malice of his old enemies was constantly piling up. But their choice of a refuge reveals how little their ecclesiastical influence was worth. The monks of St. Gildas lived in open sin, and the people around the cloister were semi-barbarians. It may be that they were ready to welcome Abelard because they supposed he would be charitable to their peccadilloes, but if they fancied this, their mistake was great. He really measured himself against their vices and suffered a predestined defeat. At St. Gildas he touched the nadir of his fate as at Paris he had reached its zenith. The monks conspired against him. They sought to poison him, contaminating with their drugs even the cup of the Eucharist. When his life was not fear it was horror, and when it was not horror it was despair.

At this time, too, for calamity never comes singly, Suger had succeeded in routing from Argenteuil the Abbess Heloise with all her nuns. He had complained to Rome that the lands of Argenteuil were the chartered right of St. Denis and that the nuns were very scandalous. So Abelard roused himself sufficiently to hand the deserted abbey of the Paraclete over to his wife; to confirm it by every possible act and deed against invasion; and to secure, in the despite of Bernard of Clairvaux, who was his presumptive enemy, a special bull of Innocent II. to make all this permanent. To these walls Heloise therefore removed. They were doubly dear to her for Abelard’s sake. She had no true “vocation” for her office, but the Pope called her and her sisterhood his “dear daughters,” and it was the best that they could do. Abelard prepared their forms of service for them, and thus again, after all these years, communication existed and letters passed between them.

These forms brought on a controversy with Bernard, who did not like them. The letters also are still extant, often translated, but never in anything except the original Latin, speaking out the real nature of the writers. On the part of Heloise they reveal the depth of an unending love. On the part of Abelard they are as cold and occasionally as cruel as anything to which a translator can turn his pen. After a careful survey of their contents the conclusion is irresistible that Heloise is a woman whose lofty love carries with it unhesitatingly the mind, the will, the senses—everything. Her faults are the faults of her time and of her teaching, not of her soul. But, by the survival of its most forcible elements, Abelard’s character has been developed into a selfish coldness both unnatural and ungrateful. As a man, at this stage of his career, one abhors and pities him.

Presently upon the dead colorlessness of this “burned-out crater healed with snow,” the red light of a new controversy is cast. In this final struggle the redoubtable force of the splendid debater flashed up once more. But he was defeated by Bernard at Sens (1140), and whether this defeat was by fair logic or by the hostile spirit of the age it does not matter. Defeated he was, and he rushed out declaring that he would appeal to Rome. Happily his way led him through Cluny, and there good, large-hearted, and large-bodied Peter the Venerable took him in. For the first time, perhaps, in all his life he came into close relations with a man genuinely great. And Peter of Cluny himself wrote to the Pope; detaining Abelard meanwhile by kind assiduities, in that genial cloister whose humanity cherished neither bigotry nor license. Later he even reconciled the two disputants, and the broken and weary debater died at last (April 21st, 1142) at St. Marcel, whither he had been sent for change of climate by the care of his hospitable friend.

There is a painting—a true artist’s conception, but a mere daub in fact—which hangs in a New York village and which represents a dead knight stretched upon the ground. He lies upon his back on the sodden earth in the melting snow. The sky above him is of a dull and awful gray, and the carrion birds are flying in a long, hurrying line to join those already at the feast. A broken sword is strained in his right hand, his armor is hacked and darkly spotted with mire and blood, and his feet have fallen into a little stream. So would have fallen Abelard but for the charity and mercy of Peter the Venerable. Remembering all that he had been it is somewhat comforting to read of his last days. For certain letters passed between Peter of Cluny and Heloise, and these, too, are extant and accessible.

The abbot says to her, after describing the daily life of Abelard, “How holily, how devoutly, in what a catholic spirit he made confession, first of his faith and then of his sins! ... Thus Master Peter finished his days, and he who for his knowledge was famed throughout the world, in the discipleship of Him who said, ‘Learn of Me, for I am meek and lowly in heart,’ persevered, in meekness and humility, and, as we may believe, passed to the Lord.” It is in such language that this benevolent man addresses his “venerable and very dear sister,” concerning, as he tenderly puts it, her “first husband in the Lord.” And doubtless this same Abelard became, at the last, a little child, who through much tribulation had unlearned his haughty and selfish temper, and had gone back from subtleties and logic to say in all simplicity, Abba, Father! And it is not less interesting for us to discover in the second epistle of Heloise to Peter of Cluny, that the mother’s heart yearns over her boy, and that she commends Astrolabe to the care and protection of his father’s benefactor, a trust which, in his next letter, Peter accepts and promises to discharge.

Of the poetry of Abelard much has unquestionably been lost. His troubadour ballads may have been conveniently suppressed; it is often the fate of wise men’s lighter productions. And his hymns were for long years untraced, except in the instance of the Mittit ad virginem and of another upon the Trinity, which was ascribed to him, but is now accredited to Hildebert. A very pretty poem, Ornarunt terram germina, preserved by Du Meril (Poesies Populaires Lat., p. 444) is given in the collection of Archbishop Trench and again in that of Professor March. Even in English its grace and daintiness do not entirely escape us, and they show how possible it was for him to have written the love-songs which celebrated Heloise.

The earth is green with grasses;

The sky is filled with lights—

Sun, moon, and stars. There passes

Vast use through days and nights.

On either hand upbuilded,

Arouse, O man, and see!

Those heavenly realms are gilded

By help which shines for thee.

The suns of winter cheer thee

For lack of fire below;

While the bright moon draws near thee,

With stars, thy path to show!

Leave pride her ivory spaces;

The poor man on the grass

Looks up, from fragrant places

By which the song-birds pass.

The rich, with wasteful labor,

(For vaulted domes shall fall,)

Mocking his poorer neighbor,

Paints heaven within his hall.

But in that open chamber

Where all things fairest are,

Let the poor man remember

How God paints sun and star.

So vast a work and splendid

Is nature’s more than man’s!

No pains nor cost attended

Those age-enduring plans!

The rich man keeps his servant,

An angel guards the poor,

And God sends stars observant

To watch above his door!

At length the adage of Buddha was fulfilled that “Hatred does not cease by hatred; hatred ceaseth by love.” This is an old rule. For in 1836 his romantic story secured an editor for the scholar’s works in the person of Monsieur Victor Cousin, who at that date, and again in 1849, republished them. They had been issued in 1616 by Francis d’Amboise at Paris, and the city of his fame and sorrow appropriately witnessed their reappearance. But even then there were no more verses, and the editors of the twelfth volume of the Histoire Litteraire de la France also regarded those productions as hopelessly lost. Yet they had been in Paris, and when the Patrologia of Migne reached “Tom. 178” they had been actually recovered. The story is of the same pattern as the author’s life—the man and his works had infinite vicissitudes.

When Belgium was occupied by the French, these ninety-three hymns, written for the abbey of the Paraclete between 1125 and 1134, were lying hid in codice quincunciali, whatever this may mean. The account seems to require a box of about five inches in height, rather than an ordinary codex or bound volume. This codex was brought to Paris and there remained during the days of Napoleon Bonaparte. When his Empire fell, the box and its contents returned to Belgium. They bore the seals of the Republic and of the Empire and they also had the stamp of the Royal Library of Brussels. They were indeed a catalogued part of that library’s treasures, but their value was unguessed. One day, after their return, a German student named Oehler, while rummaging through the codex found in it the libellus, or little book, which contained these three series of hymns. Like the “hymnarium” of Hilary they were known to have been in existence, and hence he immediately inferred their authorship. They embraced, to his delight, a complete collection for all the religious hours and for the principal festivals of the Church.

It is strikingly characteristic of the superficial nature of many studies in Latin hymnology, that Oehler apparently thought of nothing else that might be in the codex, but proceeded at once to publish eight of the recovered hymns. These, attracting the notice of Monsieur Cousin, he purchased a full transcript of the libellus at a “fair price” from the discoverer. It was, however, reserved for Émile Gachet, a Belgian, to “give a not unlucky day to paleography” in the course of which he lighted upon this same codex and found it still to contain the larger part of an epistle treating of Latin hymnology, addressed to Heloise, and announcing the hymns of which it was the preface. Thus the identification was perfect, and the introductions and the hymns are again joined with the other works of their authors. In 1838 a set of Planctus—“Lamentations”—had been found in the Vatican Library. They are moderate in merit, and these new pieces were therefore invaluable in determining Abelard’s rank as a poet. In the main, his hymns are didactic and cold. But there is at least one which has held its place anonymously in the service of the Church and upon this his reputation may safely rest. It was translated by Dr. Neale from the imperfect text of a Toledo breviary, and it can be found in Hymns, Ancient and Modern (No. 343), and in Mone (Lat. Hym. des Mittelalters, I., 382). In the Paraclete Breviary it is “xxviii., Ad Vesperas.”

O quanta, qualia sunt illa sabbata,

Quae semper celebrat superna curia!

Quae fessis requies, quae merces fortibus,

Cum erit omnia Deus in omnibus.

Vere Jherusalem illic est civitas

Cujus pax jugis est summa jucunditas,

Ubi non praevenit rem desiderium,

Nec desiderio nimis est praemium.

Quis rex! quae curia! quale palatium!

Quae pax! quae requies! quod illud gaudium!

Hujus participes exponant gloriae

Si, quantum sentiunt, possint exprimere.

Nostrum est interim mentem erigere,

Et totis patriam votis appetere,

Et ad Jherusalem a Babilonia,

Post longa regredi tandem exilia.

Illic, molestiis finitis omnibus,

Securi cantica Syon cantabimus,

Et juges gratias de donis gratiae

Beata referet plebs tibi, Domine.

Illic ex sabbato succedet sabbatum,

Perpes laetitia sabbatizantium,

Nec ineffabiles cessabunt jubili,

Quos decantabimus et nos et angeli.

Oh what shall be, oh when shall be, that holy Sabbath day,

Which heavenly care shall ever keep and celebrate alway;

When rest is found for weary limbs, when labor hath reward,

When everything, forevermore, is joyful in the Lord?

The true Jerusalem above, the holy town, is there,

Whose duties are so full of joy, whose joy so free from care;

Where disappointment cometh not to check the longing heart,

And where the soul in ecstasy hath gained her better part.

O glorious King, O happy state, O palace of the blest!

O sacred peace and holy joy and perfect heavenly rest.

To thee aspire thy citizens in glory’s bright array,

And what they feel and what they know they strive in vain to say.

For while we wait and long for home, it shall be ours to raise

Our songs and chants, and vows and prayers, in that dear country’s praise;

And from these Babylonian streams to lift our weary eyes,

And view the city that we love descending from the skies.

There, there, secure from every ill, in freedom we shall sing

The songs of Zion, hindered here by days of suffering,

And unto thee, our gracious Lord, our praises shall confess

That all our sorrow hath been good, and thou by pain canst bless.

There Sabbath day to Sabbath day sheds on a ceaseless light,

Eternal pleasure of the saints who keep that Sabbath bright;

Nor shall the chant ineffable decline, nor ever cease,

Which we with all the angels sing in that sweet realm of peace.

The rhythm of the Trinity, previously mentioned, is so good that it is usually, and, it may be, correctly, ascribed to Hildebert of Lavardin; and the Planctus Varii have really something more than that “inconsiderable merit” which Archbishop Trench allows to them. They are irregular in form and metre, and their subjects (which evidently reflect their author’s feelings) are: The Wail of Dinah; Jacob’s Lament over Joseph and Benjamin; The Sorrow of the Virgins over Jephthah’s Daughter; The Israelites’ Dirge over Samson; The Grief of David over Abner and his Elegy upon Saul and Jonathan. Abelard also composed a long poem to Astrolabe, giving him plenty of good counsel in fair pentameter, but in rather prosaic phrases. Some of it sounds like Lord Chesterfield’s worldly wisdom, and there are portions of the production which are plainly affected by the soured and saddened spirit of the author. “There is nothing,” he tells the poor, forsaken lad, “better than a good woman, and nothing worse than a bad one,” and, “as in all species of rapacious birds,” the female is the most to be dreaded!

Thus the poems which we possess number one hundred and two all told. But for ordinary readers not more than five—if we exclude the present correct Latin form of the O quanta qualia—are available in the original, and these are scattered through three or four collections. An unkind fate has still pursued these poor relics of the man who took shelter under the broad wing of Peter the Venerable, and who, by having escaped into such sanctuary, has barred out from thenceforth all uncharitable thoughts. It may be added that of Heloise also we have a reputed hymn, Requiescat a labore, but Königsfeld and Daniel both deny the authorship. In this they are doubtless correct.

We may best remember the great controversialist when he is lying dead in his new-found peace and childlikeness. At the request of Heloise, Peter of Cluny delivered up his body to be buried within the walls of the Paraclete, in defiance of any misconstruction or of any sneer. He accompanied the act with the absolution which she asked. It reads thus:

“I, Peter, Abbot of Cluny, who received Peter Abelard as a Cluniac monk, and who have granted his body to be delivered secretly [furtim delatum, wrote the big-hearted bishop] to Heloise, the abbess, and to the nuns of the Paraclete, by the authority of the Omnipotent God and of all saints, do absolve him in virtue of my office from all his sins.” This was to have been engraved upon a metal plate and fastened above the tomb of the dead rhetorician, but for some reason—perhaps connected with the furtim delatum—the plan was never carried out. But the absolution was probably attached to the tomb for a short time in order to make it effective.

“Women,” says Mrs. Browning, “are knights-errant to the last.” For a score of years, Heloise went each evening to that tomb to weep and pray. She remembered and observed nothing of those unpleasant traits which later times have noticed. If she ever cursed any one it must have been Fulbert, or others of the dead man’s enemies, and

“A curse from the depths of womanhood

Is very salt and bitter and good.”

At length, like every watching and every waiting, this, too, came to an end, and she died on May 17th, 1164, precisely at his age of sixty-three years. And they laid her beside him in the same grave, as was meet and right.

But evil fate still flapped a raven wing above the pair. Even in death they have scarcely rested in peace. In 1497 the tomb was opened from religious motives and the bodies were removed and placed in separate vaults. In 1630 the Abbess Marie de Rochefoucauld placed them in the chapel of the Trinity. In 1792 they were again removed to Nogent, near Paris. In 1800, by order of Lucien Bonaparte, they were transferred to the garden of the “Musée des Monumens Français.” This being destroyed in 1815, they were again entombed in Père-la-Chaise. M. Lenoir, keeper of the Museum, had constructed the present Gothic sepulchre out of the ruins of the abbey of the Paraclete, uniting with these an ancient tomb from St. Marcel in which Abelard had at first been laid. Pugin says that this was transferred from the Musée grounds. The monument reared at the Paraclete and ornamented with a figure of the Trinity, perished in 1794 during the confusion of the Revolution. General Pajol, the subsequent owner of the grounds, placed a marble pillar above the stone sarcophagus which yet existed, but the lead coffin had already been taken to Paris. The tomb in Père-la-Chaise has been recently repaired, and there the sentimental of all nations have brought flowers and scrawled names and scribbled verses. Even at the present day a curious collection of wire crosses, immortelles, and visiting-cards can be seen constantly upon it.

The principal inscription was composed by the Academie des Inscriptions in 1766, at the instance of Marie de Roucy de Rochefoucauld, Abbess of the Paraclete, like her namesake of 1497; and it was carved at her cost upon the stone.

Nor is this all. The story of Abelard and Heloise has a literature of its own. We have no authentic portraits, if we except the fine pictures of Robert Léfèbvre engraved by Desnoyers, which rest upon I know not what of possible likeness. But the Englishman, Berington; the Germans, Brucker and Carriere and Fessler and Schlosser and Feuerbach; the Frenchmen, De Rémusat and Cousin and Guizot and Delepierre and Lamartine and Dom Gervaise; the Italian, Tòsti; the Americans, W. W. Newton, Wight, and Abby Sage Richardson, and a host of other authors and essayists and reviewers, have in one form or another told the sad, sweet legend of this love. It has never lacked its audience, and its perpetual charm has been the character of Heloise. Like the fair and unfortunate maid of Astolat, who so pathetically loved Launcelot, it may be said of her devotion that she “gave such attendance upon him, there was never a woman did more kindlyer for man than shee did.” It was a rare exhibition of that precious jewel, an unselfish, loyal, and flawless heart!

CHAPTER XX.
PETER THE VENERABLE.

It serves to illustrate the meshes which held the highest men of the twelfth century together, when we encounter Peter the Venerable, Abbot of Cluny. His true name was Pierre Maurice de Montboisier and he was from Auvergne—“one of the noblest and most genial natures,” says Morison, “to be met with in this or in any time.” What a fine old man he was! Under him as abbot, Bernard of Cluny was prior, and the loving care of Peter prepared an epitaph for that bravest and sweetest of singers. It was he who bearded the other Bernard in his very den, and who came out of many contests against that almost invincible ecclesiast with more honor than before. Few could say this of a battle with the Abbot of Clairvaux; and to no one but Peter does Morison, the biographer of Bernard, concede any such victory.

It was also this admirable Peter who took Peter Abelard under his protection. With a large and patient generosity he developed the better nature of that headstrong, conceited, unhappy man; and when Abelard died he wrote to Heloise the really warmhearted and tender letter, with a great deal of humanity about it, which I have quoted already. And thus, to whomsoever it may fall to consider the history of France in the twelfth century; or of Abelard and the new philosophy; or of Bernard and ecclesiastical polity; or of the other Bernard and the Latin hymns, it is inevitable that the name of Peter the Venerable shall arise and stand high above the throng of those by which he is surrounded.

His mother’s name was Raingarde, and her death, long after he had attained his wide reputation, was deeply felt by him as that of one of the best of women and dearest of mothers. For Pierre de Montboisier, in those days when the stagnation and corruption of thought and morals were not felt as they were felt later on, was a man as well as a monk. But when, at last, the religious people became monks and not men; when they were stupid, uninteresting, fat-fleshed and gross in life; when they had no courage or piety; then they neither did the world any good nor made their own souls ripe for heaven. And as sportsmen tell us that the mellow “bob-o-link” ceases to sing and is only fit for slaughter when he becomes the “rice bird” of the South, so it was with them. Latin hymnology almost ceases to be interesting after this century. And Peter the Venerable, while he wrote but little himself, is too fine a factor in the arousing of others for us to forget him and his work.

He must have been born in 1092 or 1094—the earlier date being more probable; and when he was sixteen or seventeen (1109) he became a monk of Cluny. These were the “black” monks;—as the Cistercians of Citeaux and Clairvaux were the “white.” He had six brothers, most of whom took similar vows. What else indeed was there to do? You must either hack and hew your way with a battle-axe, and risk your neck and your castle, or you must become a monk. There was no middle course. Peace-loving, studious people—those who aimed to help the world up toward God—had no other choice. Nowadays we should find plenty of room for Peter; but he did what was then best, and entered Cluny.

At thirty years of age he was its abbot. This was in 1122. It happened by reason of Pontius, the former abbot, a self-sufficient and imperious man, being forced to resign his office and go on pilgrimage to Palestine; he even promised not to come back at all. Then the monks of Cluny elected another abbot; and as he died almost immediately, they were compelled to choose a third, namely Peter. But it was in a hard seat that they placed him; he had a mismanaged property, and a body of men who needed a good deal of attention.

Let us picture him to us in the fashion and habit of his appearance. He had a “happy face,” a “majestic figure,” and “plenty of those other unfailing signs of virtues” which justified his name “The Venerable.” It was such a big-hearted, big-bodied style of man who now undertook this reformation. By the help of Matthew, Prior of St. Martin in the Fields, near Paris, he effected it in about three months. Then there was a period of peace. But, all of a sudden, here comes Pontius, with soldiers at his heels, when Peter is absent, wanting his old place again. He bursts in the gates, forces the monks who remain to swear allegiance, carries off crosses and candlesticks and whatever was worth anything for melting down into money, and plays robber-baron over all the neighborhood. Peter himself tells the story: “He came in my absence.... With a motley crowd of soldiers and women rushing in together, he marched into the cloisters. He turned his hand to the sacred things.... He raided the villages and castles around the abbey, and, trying to subdue the religious places in a barbaric way, he wasted with fire and sword all that he could.” It was certainly a very serious matter.

Peter did the best he could with it—this resulting in Honorius II. despatching a legate from Rome with a great curse, ready-baked and smoking-hot, for the soul’s benefit of that “sacrilegious, schismatic, and excommunicate usurper,” Pontius. I have not read the curse; but I am positively certain that Pontius and Pontius Pilate must have been elaborately compared in its sentences. Such anathemas were supposed to dry the blood and wither the brain. Pontius trembled and restored his ill gotten gains and vanished to his own place. And Peter had peace at last.

There had already been a controversy with St. Bernard about Robert, Bernard’s cousin, who liked the cordiality of Cluny a good deal better than the thin-visaged and almost fierce zeal of Clairvaux. For this reason he changed his allegiance. Consequently Bernard wanted him sent home. And by this time he was, according to strict rule, actually restored. However, Clairvaux chuckled very much at the confusion in Cluny; and Bernard was ungenerous enough to take this time, of all others, to publish quite an elaborate and even brilliant disparagement of the Cluniac rule. I shall let this also pass for the present, for it will meet us again, only saying that Peter seems to have gone on wisely about his own business and avoided any reply—a quite unusual proceeding in a controversial age. In 1126 he had taken up again his previous line of administration; and when this “apology” came out in 1127 he was practically meeting its objections in the best manner. As Frederick Maurice says of him, “The Abbot of Cluny would have wished the monk to be rather an example to men of the world of what they might become, than the type of a kind of life which was in opposition to theirs. He feared that a grievously stringent rule would lead ultimately to a terrible laxity.”

In 1130 Pope Honorius died. Pierre de Leon (Peter Leonis), calling himself Anacletus, got himself illegally elected, and seized the control at Rome. Cardinal Gregory of San Angelo, who was the rightful but weaker claimant, assumed the title of Innocent II., and forthwith set out to secure the help of the great abbeys of France. Now Anacletus had been a Cluniac; and Bernard, Peter’s and Cluny’s opponent, favored Innocent. But when Innocent, in 1132, appeared at Cluny, he was hailed as the true and genuine Pope—a piece of magnanimity which he had no right to expect.

And from this time Peter’s allegiance was undoubted; although, like a great many persons in the world, Innocent II. conceded more to the stern will of Bernard than to the generous conduct of the Abbot of Cluny. Indeed, he did but very little in the way of privilege for Peter’s abbey; and he turned nearly all his gifts and favors toward Bernard. This so exalted the Cistercians that Peter protested. It is a blot upon Innocent that such a protest was needed. For Peter had been the first to welcome him, sending him “sixty horses and mules, with everything which could be wanted by a pope in distress.”

Many a man would have wheeled around and left the ingrate. But Peter’s revenge was handsome and characteristic. He summoned a general chapter of his order; and it was held at the time that Innocent, recognized at length, was going away to Rome. There were “two hundred priors and a thousand ecclesiasts,” delegates from France, England, Spain, Germany, and Italy. These cheerfully and promptly agreed to accept a more stringent rule in all their religious houses. And thus Innocent, and his Warwick of a Bernard, could see for themselves the strength and the charity, and the sincere purpose of the man whom they were setting aside. I feel that I must here add the exact words in which Morison, St. Bernard’s best biographer, justifies this estimate of the character of Peter the Venerable. “The relations between Peter and Bernard throughout their lives,” he says (p. 222, note), “give rise to contrasts little favorable to the latter. Peter nearly always is gentle, conciliating, and careful not to give offence, even when as here (in the case of the Bishop of Langres) sorely provoked. Bernard too often made return by hard and even violent language and conduct.”

With such a stately and well-balanced person in our mind’s eye, we cannot be surprised to find that he had plenty of solid pluck, that he was “mild as he was game, and game as he was mild.” In 1134, returning from the Council of Pisa against Anacletus, he and his followers were attacked by robbers. The abbot tucked up his sleeves, and took the sword of the Church militant on the spot. Perhaps he was glad to let his big thews and sinews have full play. At all events he so dashed and smote these ungodly men, that he beat them actually back, and had therefrom considerable glory. I never read that he or his abbey was much meddled with afterward.

About this date his visits to Spain drew his attention to the Koran. He was struck by the religious efficiency of it, and in order to meet it better he prepared for a full translation of it. Peter of Toledo, Hermann of Dalmatia, and an Englishman named Robert Kennet, or perhaps (says the Histoire Litteraire) de Retines, were selected for this duty. To them were added an Arab scholar and Peter of Poitiers, the abbot’s favorite private secretary. They were to render the Koran into Latin directly; and at it they went, accomplishing their task between 1141 and 1144, at the time of an epidemic in the monastery. Then Peter himself joined with them in a refutation of its errors—albeit his Latinity was not first-rate, being rather that of a man of affairs than of a student. There was another Latin refutation of the Koran by Brother Richard, a Dominican who lived in the thirteenth and into the fourteenth century. Luther translated that into German in 1542.

What a warm-blooded, good, hearty fellow Peter must have been! He had only found three hundred monks at Cluny in 1122; but Hugo of Cluny, his successor, was entitled to take rule, there and elsewhere, over ten thousand. Mount Tabor, the Valley of Jehoshaphat, and Constantinople were among the places where the “black” monks were well established. And a large share of this was due to the sagacity and statesmanship of Peter. In proof of this fine humanity, take his behavior to Abelard. The full story comes properly in another place; for Abelard himself was a writer of hymns, and worthy of more than transient reference. But when poor Abelard was repudiated, disgraced, shamefully mutilated, and nearly at despair’s edge, wearied out with St. Gildas and his refractory monks, and finally defeated by the purer and higher logic of Bernard, then, indeed, do we see Peter of Cluny at his best. He received the disappointed and broken man with “the welcome of an unutterably guileless and sympathetic heart.” Cluny’s gates opened wide to take him in. Cluny’s genial, restful spirit closed in about his own like the feathers of the mother bird around her callow, shivering brood.

And when he dies, it is Cluny’s abbot who details with the loving particularity, which would most help the sore heart of Heloise, all his last doings. He speaks even to the kinship of every age when, after this long and tender letter, whose Latin glows with a deep fervency, he closes in this wise: “May God, in your stead, comfort him in his bosom; comfort him as another you; and guard him till through grace he is restored to you at the coming of the Lord, with the shout of the archangel and the trump of God descending from the heavens.”

It is time that we speak of his writings, of which a full edition was published at Paris in 1522, one of the Cluniac monks being its compiler. Frequently, during the next two hundred years, they are republished in whole or in part. They are thus by no means inaccessible, though their merit is not so great. One of the important works is directed against the Jews, for whom he had a most pious dislike. Others are in the nature of epistles or of controversial replies, valuable only for their time and their spirit.

Of his verse, however, we have left us but about fourteen specimens. One of these is against the detractors of the poetry of Peter of Poitiers, who were nearer right than he supposed them to be. Another is a rhymed epistle to a certain Raimond, of some sixty-four lines. Then we have a “prose,” the word being cognate to prosody, in honor of Jesus Christ. Its structure, except for the additional short syllable, is identical with the “leonine and tailed rhyme” of Bernard of Morlaix, his prior:

“A patre mittitur, in terris nascitur, Deus de virgine

Humana patitur, docet et moritur, libens pro homine.”

It celebrates Him, sent from the Father, born on the earth, God from a virgin, wearing our mortal shape, teaching and tarrying with us, and atoning for our sins. The best, perhaps, of all his poems is what Trench and March quote:

“Mortis portis fractis, fortis

Fortior vim sustulit,”—

the real original of those splendid lines:

“Now broken are the bars of Death,

And crushed thy sting, Despair!”—

which we find in Bishop Heber’s resurrection hymn, commencing, “God is gone up with a merry noise.” There is a life to these verses which one must understand their author in order to appreciate. They follow, in the best attire that I can give them. They are exultant rather than illustrious. It is the man and not his measures whom we celebrate! Daniel does not think it worth his while to include him at all. Archbishop Trench takes his own text from the Bibliotheca Cluniacense, Paris, 1614: