The Latin Hymn-writers and Their Hymns

by Samuel Willoughby Duffield

VENI, CREATOR SPIRITUS.

Veni, Creator Spiritus,

Mentes tuorum visita,

Imple superna gratia

Quae tu creasti pectora.

Qui Paraclitus diceris,

Donum Dei altissimi,

Fons vivus, ignis, charitas,

Et spiritalis unctio.

Tu septiformis munere,

Dextrae Dei tu digitus,

Tu rite promissum Patris,

Sermone ditans guttura.

Accende lumen sensibus,

Infunde amorem cordibus,

Infirma nostri corporis,

Virtute firmans perpetim.

Hostem repellas longius,

Pacemque dones protinus,

Ductore sic te praevio

Vitemus omne noxium.

Per te sciamus da Patrem

Noscamus atque Filium,

Te utriusque Spiritum,

Credamus omni tempore.

O Holy Ghost, Creator, come!

Thy people’s minds pervade;

And fill with thy supernal grace

The souls which thou hast made.

Thou who art called the Paraclete,

The gift of God most high;

Thou living fount, and fire, and love,

Our spirit’s pure ally;

Thou sevenfold Giver of all good;

Finger of God’s right hand;

Thou promise of the Father, rich

In words for every land;

Kindle our senses to a flame,

And fill our hearts with love,

And through our bodies’ weakness, still

Pour valor from above!

Drive farther off our enemy,

And straightway give us peace;

That, with thyself as such a guide,

We may from evil cease.

Through thee may we the Father know,

And thus confess the Son;

For thee (from both the Holy Ghost),

We praise while time shall run.

Rabanus Maurus, teacher and Abbot of Fulda and Archbishop of Mayence (Mainz), was commonly called the “foremost German of his time.” Though the centuries have somewhat obscured the lustre of his renown, they have not deprived him of his place in history, nor have they dissociated his name from that of his instructor, prototype, and model, the great pedagogue Alcuin.

Of the birthplace of Rabanus we have no certain knowledge. Some have said that he was Scotch or English, others that he was French; but the more reliable authorities are convinced that he was a German, born either at Fulda or Mainz. The epitaph written by himself affords probably the solution of the question. It was composed at Mainz while its author was archbishop, and contains these words:

“Urbe quidem hac genitus sum, ac sacro fonte renatus,

In Fulda post haec dogma sacrum didici.”

That is, he was born at the place where he was writing these verses—most likely Mainz—and there he was baptized. Afterward he was educated in Fulda. An additional reason for this belief is that his father was of a family known in the records of Mainz.

Trithemius says that Rabanus was born in 788 quarto nonas Februarii, the second of February. Mabillon adds, “I do not know whence he got the day; the year is probably pretty close.” But the year itself, on the strength of internal evidence found in the man’s writings and in the monastic rules regarding the holding of office before the attainment of a fixed age, Mabillon places at 776. This extension of twelve years is a very important affair since it makes Rabanus a monk of thirty-three at the date of the Council of Aquisgranum (Aix-la-Chapelle or Aachen), called by Charlemagne to reannunciate the doctrine of the procession of the Holy Spirit.

The name of Rabanus’s father was Ruthard and his mother was christened Aldegunde. “She was a woman of the most honest conversation,” as Trithemius declares, the fit helpmeet of a man “rich and powerful, who for a long time served in the wars under the Frank princes.” There was a brother, doubtless an elder brother, called Tutin, a person “noble among the first,” and perhaps the father of a nephew, Gundram, whom Rabanus mentions as the royal chaplain of Lewis of Germany.

The lad Raban—“the raven”—took on his dark garments at nine years of age and went to be a little shaveling monk at Fulda. There he continued, patiently toiling on at his studies according to the methods of a benighted time, and it is plain that he progressed so well as to get the favor of his abbot, Ratgar. Since Ratgar took office in 801 or 802, and Alcuin died in May, 804, it must have been at or about the twenty-fifth year of his age that Rabanus was directed to put himself under the care of Alcuin. A record which has been preserved shows that in 801 our poet had been made a deacon at Fulda, and it is natural for us to look upon this journey to the monastic school of St. Martin at Tours as an honor given to one who had already earned some distinction in scholarship.

Be this as it may it is certain that nearly the latest work of Alcuin’s life was the preparation of the successor to his own ideas who should hold high the torch of knowledge to his land and generation. To him—though the old eyes at Tours should not see it—was to succeed Walafrid Strabo, and to Walafrid Strabo were to be added the scholars of St. Gall, and notably the marvellous cripple Herman of Reichenau. Ratgar now was busy building a great church, and architectural notions befogged his brain. But he had built better than he was aware when he sent off Rabanus and Hatto to sit at the feet of the man who had brought the system of Bede the Venerable into Gaul, and who was to commit his own enthusiasm for learning to a greater scholar than Paul Winfrid, the Deacon.

This Hatto was not the infamous bishop of the Rat Tower whom Southey has immortalized in blood-curdling verses. That notorious prelate was indeed Abbot of Fulda and Bishop of Mainz, but he died in 969 or 970, and the swarming rats which devoured him for his avarice in keeping the corn from the poor owe their original celebrity to those curious volumes, the Centuries of Magdeburg. So far as we can discover, the Hatto who accompanied Rabanus became neither famous nor infamous, unless it be something to have obtained the abbacy of Fulda when his friend laid it down.

In 804 Rabanus returned to Fulda. He had profited by the instruction he had received, and was now the fittest person to be put at the head of the school in the cloisters. To his original name the old teacher had affixed the honorable title Maurus, and to this again Rabanus himself added the descriptive adjective Magnentius. So that Rabanus Maurus Magnentius is the full appellation of the man henceforth to be styled with the largest truth, Primus Germaniae preceptor. This giving of names was one of the features of those times. Alcuin was called Albinus Flaccus, Paul Winfrid was known as Bonifacius, and Ratbert, the advocate of transubstantiation, became Paschasius. Besides this, the spelling of proper names was very much at sea. Thus, to the R of Rabanus there was prefixed or suffixed a Greek “rough breathing,” making it HRabanus or Rhabanus, precisely as we some times find HLudovicus or HLotharius.

It is at this time that the true skill and ability of Rabanus appear before us. He was the first person to establish a school in Germany which had in it the promise of modern education. He allowed pupils to attend and be trained in the cloisters who had no vocation for a monastic life. In point of fact he was the real founder of the school system of Germany, and his fellow-countrymen have not been slow to accredit him with the achievement. His life and accomplishments have employed the pens of Buddeus, Schwarz, Dahl, Bach, Kunstmann, Spengler, Köhler, Richter, and other writers on the history of paedagogik.[7] It is beyond debate that the school at Fulda was a most remarkable place.

Rabanus was not the only teacher in the school. He was assisted by his faithful friend Samuel of Worms, a fellow pupil under Alcuin. Together these men developed and enlarged the minds of many of the future nobles of Germany, and laid in Bible study and in the advanced opinions which they announced, the foundations for a nation the most scholarly of any on the earth. In these classes were to be seen such disciples of the new learning as Walafrid Strabo, Servatus Lupus, Einhard (who subsequently sent thither his son Wussin), and Rudolf who wrote the life of his preceptor.

Leaving the manner of that ancient school life for the present, we are struck with astonishment at the broad and liberal tone of the instruction. Rabanus followed Bede in providing an encyclopaedia of human knowledge for his pupils. He entitled it De Universis and based it on the previous work of Isidore of Seville. Additionally he abridged the grammar of Priscian, a treatise which furnished, even as late as the days of Richard Braythwaite and his Drunken Barnabee, the suggestive line,

“Fregi frontem Prisciani.”

“I’ve broke Priscian’s forehead mainly.”

He also furnished a text-book in arithmetic, drawn mostly from Boethius, and an etymology in which he depends to some extent on Isidore. He utilized Bede for chronology, and Gregory for ecclesiastical forms, and Augustine for doctrine, and Cassiodorus for commentary and exegesis.

Moreover, he was free from much of the superstition of his age. He objected to giving the liver of a mad dog to one who had been bitten by it—that being then held a perfect cure. His letters show an independent and almost an audacious mind. In all religious discussion his motto was, “When the cause is Christ’s, the opposition of the bad counts for naught.” In statecraft—for ecclesiastics were chief movers in these affairs—he held with Ludwig the Pious. He wrote a great deal in the way of Scripture commentary, and his intellect was of a mystical order. He delighted in allegories, in enshrining the bones of saints and confessors, and in making the most marvellous and intricate anagrams and arrangements of verses and letters upon the subject of the Holy Cross, whose praise he has elaborately set forth. Wimpfeling may well style this production a “wonderful and highly elaborate work.” It dates from the year 815, and no modern reader can view it without dismay at its enormous expenditure of labor.

A man like this in the teacher’s seat of Fulda would not be long in obscuring by his manifest talents the feebler light of his abbot. So Ratgar found, and devoted himself and his monks with mistimed zeal to the erection of a great addition to the cloister church. He grudged the time given to the studies of the school. He would much prefer to have had the full control of all that was passing in the cloisters, but this was plainly impossible. So he devised a very satisfactory way of interrupting the success of Rabanus. He took the books from the scholars and he even forbade them to the teacher. This was the cause of some pathetic verses in which Rabanus sets forth his petition for their return. “Let thy clemency,” he exclaims, “concede me books, for the poverty of knowledge suffocates me.” One grates his teeth in reading farther on the words, “Whether you do this or not, yet let the divine power of the Omnipotent always afford you all good things and complete a good fight with an honest course, that you may ever be with Christ in the height of heaven.”

Ratgar was a tyrant; there was no doubt of that. The only question was how long this tyranny would survive the loss of students and the defection of the monks, who had already begun to complain and resist. There was not any hope, however, that this line of conduct would be materially altered, and here again we have verses of Rabanus, lamenting in moving terms the loss of scholars and the demoralization of the school. It is not at all unlikely that the praises of the Holy Cross were the solace of the poor pedagogue who had lost his favorite volumes. He could scarcely otherwise have found the leisure for this elegant trifling.

The poem just mentioned is imperfect. It breaks off abruptly and the conclusion is missing. What it may have had to do with the outcome of Ratgar’s tyranny we therefore cannot say, but the times upon which the monastery had fallen were very grievous; and in 807 there was a pestilence which depleted the list of monks from four hundred down to one hundred and fifty, and these must, of course, have been more pressed by the manual labor than ever. They toiled as did Israel in bondage, and yet the end had not come. It was a period of the worst sort of misrule, paralleled later at Cluny and not unknown in other conventual establishments. In 814 Rabanus was ordained priest on December 23d, and, as is supposed, after his withdrawal for a time from the monastery to the refuge offered by a friend’s house. From a passage in one of his commentaries it has been inferred that he used this suspense of his labors to make a journey to Palestine.

In 811 there was, says Dahl, a great confusion (Verwirrung) in the cloister. A libel was sent to Charles the Great criticising the conduct of Ratgar—“libel” being used in its old sense of “little treatise.” Nothing, as it would seem, was done about this, although the ordination of Rabanus may have been a link in the chain.

But when Ludwig the Pious (Ludwig der Fromme) came to the kingdom Ratgar was summarily deposed, and Egil, a kindly, book-loving man, created abbot in his stead. This occurred in 817, three years after Ludwig began to reign. All difficulties were now over. The school was reopened with greater prosperity than before. The library was increased. The secular scholars were taught outside the walls, for the number of students surpassed the accommodation. And, in a word, Ratgar had merely held back a constantly augmenting torrent which now poured itself in in an intrepid tide. When Martin Luther, centuries later, cries out for intelligent instruction and for the extension of the school system of Germany, he is but repeating the cry which swelled in the ears of Ratgar and drove him before it with execration from his abbacy.

In 822, when Egil died, by common consent Rabanus was invested with the dignity of abbot. For a time things went smoothly enough, and such scholars as Walafrid Strabo, Servatus Lupus, and Otfried of Weissenberg were the glory of the Fulda schools. But the pendulum swung too far in the rebound from Ratgar’s illiterate policy. The monks were kept at writing and teaching with too little discrimination as to their tastes and capacities. They began to grumble that the material interests of the monastery were neglected, and that Fulda might be growing rich in books and in bookworms, but was in danger of becoming poor in everything else. The disaffection found a support in Archbishop Otgar of Mainz, a busy political prelate, who seems to have become jealous of the prominence of Rabanus. As a supporter of Lothar and of the policy of imperial unity, he was in politics on the other side from Rabanus. Our abbot was a Nationalist and a Home Ruler. He wished to foster the cultivation of the German tongue and to maintain the distinctness of the German nation. He had stood by poor, weak Ludwig the Pious, whose sorrow it was to have succeeded to the work of Charles the Great. He addressed to him a letter of consolation in his troubles, and wrote a treatise: De Reverentia Filiorum erga Patres et Subditorum erga Reges, to recall his unfilial children to a sense of their duty. In Ludwig the German he recognized the most dutiful of the three. So when the Emperor Ludwig died in 840, he supported the younger Ludwig in the demand for virtual German independence against the high-handed imperialism of his elder brother Lothar. He thus shared in the triumph of the victory at Fontanetum, followed by the Compact of Verdun (843), which practically put an end to Karling imperialism, and secured the national independence of France and Germany. But in the mean time Otgar enabled the illiterate party at Fulda to drive Rabanus into exile, and when he came back he found the brethren had chosen another abbot, Hatto, in his stead. Waiving his own rights, and laying aside all grudges, he betook himself to his books in a priory or something of the sort on Mount St. Peter, not far off, and resumed the work of teaching. Here he is thought to have composed his great philosophical treatise on the All, which marks a distinct advance in the development of mediaeval metaphysics and logic. Indeed, there was but one thinker of the ninth century who surpassed him in penetration and learning—the wonderful Irish monk, John Scotus Erigena, who wrote Latin but thought in Greek and was filled with all the wisdom of the Hellenes, from Plato to Dionysius the Areopagite.

In 847 Archbishop Otgar died, and Ludwig the German elevated his friend Rabanus to the see of Mainz, the metropolitan see of Germany. Since Boniface, the Anglo-Saxon “Apostle of Germany,” who had succeeded to this dignity a century earlier, there had been no man of such eminence at the head of the German Church, nor have any of his successors surpassed him. His first care was the restoration of the discipline, which had decayed under the confusions of those dark days of civil war. A great synod met at Mainz in October, Rabanus having been consecrated in June. Besides the prelates, abbots and monks of all orders attended, and the canons adopted had reference to stricter life as the obligation of the clergy.

The year was not over before news of fresh trouble reached him. One of his own pupils at Fulda, the monk Gottschalk, a man of restless intellect, was reported as spreading an exaggerated version of Augustine’s doctrine of absolute predestination, and one which threatened to overturn the very idea of human responsibility. Gottschalk evidently was one of the people who love to walk on the fence rather than in the road—to carry every principle with ruthless logic to its remotest conclusion. The first news of his extravagances reached Rabanus in a letter from Italy setting forth the doctrines his former pupil was teaching. He at once responded in a letter (or rather a treatise) taking the same ground as the semi-Pelagians had done in the controversy with the school of Augustine, ground sanctioned by Gregory the Great, Beda, and Alcuin, although thought unsafe when first defended by Gennadius and John Cassian. Gottschalk seems to have accepted the reply as a sort of challenge. The next year, 848, he made his way to Mainz, and when Rabanus called together an assembly of churchmen and laymen—not a regular synod—he appeared before it with a confession of his faith in which he replied to the arguments of Rabanus. The assembly failed to convince him of his being in error, and at the king’s suggestion a pledge was exacted of him that he would never return to Germany. Hincmar of Rheims, the metropolitan of the Church of France, made sure of his keeping this pledge. As Gottschalk was handed over to him by King Ludwig, with a letter of explanation from Rabanus, he had him condemned by the Synod of Quiercy (853) to deposition from the priesthood, corporal chastisement until he should burn his confession with his own hands, and lifelong imprisonment. So ended, in 867, this Calvinist of the ninth century, without much credit to anybody who had a hand in his fate, but with least of discredit to Rabanus.

In 852, by order of King Ludwig, another synod convened at Mainz, to discuss, it is supposed, the doctrine of transubstantiation, which Paschasius Radbertus of Corbie had been setting forth in his treatise, De Corpore et Sanguine Christi. Our Rabanus resisted the new dogma, declaring that the participation of the Lord’s body and blood in the sacrament is “not carnal but spiritual.” Nor is this the only point of his agreement with Protestant teaching. Especially in his assertion that the Bible is a book for every Christian, and clear and intelligible as a rule of faith, he anticipates Luther.

In 850 a great famine desolated Germany, in whose course people were driven to the terrible deeds which sometimes characterize such times. Rabanus did his possible to relieve the terrible needs of his flock. Three hundred of these poor people were fed daily from his resources as archbishop, and his heart went out in pity to the multitudes he could not aid. Pitiful scenes he must have witnessed. One poor woman fell dead as she staggered to his threshold, with a babe at her breast. His charity was too late to save her, but her child was rescued.

He lived six years more, seeing his diocese recover from the desolation of that terrible winter, cherishing the literary and educational work of the monasteries on the lines laid down in his De Institutione Clericorum, keeping his clergy up to the ideal of the priestly life as defined in his De Disciplina Ecclesiastica, and civilizing the rude people of his great diocese. He died in 856, in his eightieth year, and was buried in St. Alban’s church in Mainz. In the era of the Reformation his bones were transferred to St. Maurice’s church in Halle. As Rome has not inscribed the opponent of transubstantiation in the list of her saints, they are allowed to rest together in peace, instead of being distributed through a long series of churches as relics.

He had composed for himself an epitaph, as was the fashion of those days, but it is pleasanter to read than some of those exaggeratedly humble and prosaic treatises concerning which we hardly know whether most to stand amazed at the badness of the Latin or the meanness of the piety. Rabanus avoids these objectionable features. His language is that of a poet and his sentiments those of a sincere Christian. Particularly there are two lines which are notable because they give us a glimpse of his personality:

“Promptus erat animus, sed tardans debile corpus;

Feci quod poteram, quodque Deus dederat.”

“Quick was my mind, but slow was my body through weakness;

That which I could I have done, and what the Lord gave me.”

One of his latest bequests was that of his books, which he devised, like a true scholar, partly to his old abbey of Fulda and partly to the monastery of St. Alban at Mainz.

John Trithemius eulogizes him in words which may, perhaps, be transferred into our pages from their original Latin as a specimen of the praise which Rabanus has always received—praise that is indeed worthy of the man who wrote the Veni, Creator.

“Rabanus was first among the Germans; a scholar universally erudite; profound in science; eloquent and strong in discourse; in life and conversation he shone as most learned, religious, and holy; he was always a prelate dignified, affable, and acceptable before God.”

This same Trithemius gives us a little notion of the bishop’s appearance. In body, he says that he was tolerably robust; of a sanguine, bilious temperament; rather fleshly in person than inclined to meagreness (macilentus); with a “courageous and great” head; and of a well-proportioned figure.

Of the other writings of Rabanus it is sufficient for us to name his compendium of the grammar of Priscian; his great work upon The Universe; his treatise upon the Praises of the Holy Cross, and his elaborate commentaries upon the various books of the Bible. He also prepared homilies and sundry compositions relative to ecclesiastical matters. In the Patrologia of Migne it requires six closely-printed volumes to cover his contributions to sacred literature. Especially we have occasion to note his theological writings, as it is in these that his spiritual character is most apparent.

His works mostly are dead enough to modern interest, but not all. German philology honors in him a great churchman who shared Charles the Great’s respect for German speech and culture, and at whose feet Otto of Weissenburg, the poet of the Krist, sat. German pedagogics recognizes in him the first Praeceptor Germaniae, who transplanted to Fulda the generous plans of education which Charles conceived, and which Alcuin executed at Tours. German philosophy recognizes in him the first forerunner of the great series of her metaphysicians. But to us he is Rabanus the poet, who acquired the art of verse under Alcuin, who used it at times to little purpose as in his De Laudibus Sanctae Crucis, but who in a happy hour wrote the Veni, Creator Spiritus.

CHAPTER XIII.
NOTKER OF ST. GALL, CALLED BALBULUS.

In the life of Notker, written by Ekkehard (Eckhardt) the Younger, who was Dean of St. Gall in 1220, we have a perfect mine of garrulous gossip and of chattering, pleasant romance. It has been called “one of the most delightful of mediaeval memoirs;” though we are very little disposed to accept a large share of it as solid fact. There is in it much confusion, both of dates and names. From one of its stories came the designation of Charles the Great (“the Emperor Charles”) as the author of the Veni Creator, a point which we have treated more fully in the chapter upon Rabanus Maurus. The copyist is mainly accountable for these blunders, some of which are so grossly anachronistic as to be at once corrected by their reader; and others are so puerile that no one can easily be deceived.

Since it is to Notker that we owe the “sequence” in its full development, it may be as well for us to let Ekkehard sketch his character at full length. The biography is in one of the April volumes of the Acta Sanctorum of the Bollandist Fathers—a great white-covered folio which displays the immense research of its editors. For those who are less inclined to the Latin language in its monkish form, there is the admirable abridgment by Baring-Gould, known as the Lives of the Saints—a compilation which must be always distinguished from the work of the same title by Alban Butler. From these sources a great deal of truth and falsehood, fact and fiction, real record and unreal romance, have flowed forth upon the world. We cannot but speak reverently and kindly of such noble endeavors as those of Dr. Neale, but here, at the very outset, it must be understood that he has been altogether too much swayed by peculiar opinions for his ideas upon sequences—and upon Notker also—to have the weight of absolute authority.

Notker himself is to be discriminated from another Notker of the same religious house of St. Gall, who is generally known as “the Physician.” This one is Balbulus, or “the Stammerer,” who is sometimes called “Vetustior,” the Elder, to distinguish him from his nephew, Notkerus Junior. He came, Ekkehard asserts, of noble and even royal parentage, being probably born about the year 850. At an early age he entered the monastery of St. Gall, in Switzerland, which had been founded by Gallus, the Irish saint, a disciple of Columbanus, in the seventh century. This celebrated man died, A.D. 640, at the age of ninety-five, and his life was written by Walafrid Strabo in two books; the martyrology recording his death upon October 16th. St. Gall itself is now a town of some fifteen thousand inhabitants, and the capital of the canton to which it has given its own name. But the abbey was suppressed in 1805, though the library, filled with valuable manuscripts, still remains. From these ancient parchments P. Gall Morel, Librarian at Einsiedeln, has resuscitated many sequences and hymns formerly employed in their services.

The Sangallensian poets are not, however, very numerous. Hartmann was probably the earliest composer of a “sequence”—a style of sacred poem which we shall consider presently. Then came Notker Balbulus, who has the greater renown. Tutilo and Ratpert and Walafrid Strabo complete the list. St. Gall was for years a noted centre of learning. It is well situated, and from its towers the waters of the Boden-See (from which it is distant but a few miles) can be readily discerned.

Here, then, Notker began his religious life. He had probably seen the light in the green and fertile Thurgau not far away from St. Gall. And his talents were soon so noticeable that he rapidly advanced in the esteem of his associates. Meanwhile—for the Irish and Scottish monks made this a thoroughfare on their pilgrimages to Rome—there came along an Irish bishop named Mark, whose nephew, Maengal, strongly aroused the admiration of Notker. Maengal’s music especially affected him, and he devoutly prayed God to let the Irishman tarry with them at St. Gall. This indeed happened, and Maengal, rechristened Marcellus, remained in Switzerland.

This good tutor now undertook the musical training of Notker, Ratpert, and Tutilo. And from this beginning arose the choral school of St. Gall. Ekkehard’s history of it is most suggestive. It was originally begun, he says, for the study of the Gregorian tones, but these Swiss people had by degrees lost the sweetness of the old Pope’s music. And he borrows the language of John the Deacon, in his life of Gregory, to satirize the “thundering voices” with which such “Alpine bodies” failed to secure the proper modulation. I borrow Baring-Gould’s idiomatic rendering of this significant passage. It runs as follows:

“The barbarous hugeness of those tippling throats, when endeavoring to utter a soft song full of inflections and diphthongs, makes a great roar, as though carts were tumbling down steps headlong; and so, instead of soothing the minds of those who listen, it agitates and exasperates them beyond endurance.”

Such was the character of church music when the song school of St. Gall was started. The monks had already been so fortunate as to secure one of the two Gregorian antiphonaries sent by Pope Adrian to the Emperor Charles the Great. The occurrence was curious enough to be chronicled, and the story merits our own repetition. Metz had been the German music centre, but when the French music clashed with that which was considered the correct and Gregorian method, Charles again solicited from the Pope two priests who were thorough musicians, and should put Metz and her school above criticism. These two men, by name Peter and Romanus, set out thereupon, but took a heavy cold between them at Lago Maggiore (aere Romanis contrario quaterentur). Peter soon recovered, but Romanus advanced from a mere cold into an actual fever, and remained at St. Gall with one of the antiphonaries, while the disgusted Peter, who claimed both copies, was forced to proceed alone and with a single manuscript to Metz.

St. Gall was sufficiently attractive to Romanus for him to make no effort to leave it when he grew convalescent. And these compositions and melodies of his were the foundation upon which, in later years, Notker and Hartmann and the others built their sequences. That which Maengal now effected was the real beginning of that system of music which is so elaborately treated by Dr. Neale in his preface to the second volume of Daniel’s Thesaurus. Perhaps more has been made of it there than it really deserves. It is certainly too far out of the line of this inquiry of ours for us to discuss the point technically. One of the best definitions of the sequence is, however, that of Mabillon, who calls such compositions “rhythmical prayers” (rythmicae preces).

Notker became easily—so Ekkehard asserts—the finest musician about the abbey. He was also a bright and rather witty man. When Augustine was asked what God was doing before He created the world, he replied that He “was building hell for such vain and frivolous spirits” as that of his questioner. The chaplain of Charles the Fat put a similar inquiry to Notker, and got quite as brief a retort. He asked, “What is God doing now?” And Notker stammered out, “Just what He has always done and always will do; He is putting down the proud and exalting the humble!”

There is another of these queer anecdotes which will serve to show that the old monks were by no means destitute of a sense of humor. A certain young Salomon, son of the Count of Ramsweg, was a student of the abbey school, and something of a snob among his fellow-scholars. Notker, Ratpert, Tutilo and Hartmann were of as good family as he, and they did not enjoy his behavior. Finally, through favoritism, Salomon came to be abbot of six monasteries and Bishop of Constance in addition. But in spite of these dignities he had a singular predilection for the Abbey of St Gall, and was accustomed to put on a surplice and go about the place attending the offices like a regular monk—which, by the way, he had no right to do. His old friends found this out, and raised so much of a stir about it that he ceased from the practice. But at night he still persisted in entering the abbey and aiding in the services.

Rudiger, one of the confederates, was therefore set to watch for the coming of the intruding bishop, and when Salomon slipped along toward the church in the darkness the watcher suddenly thrust a light in his face and saw who it was. Then this valiant Rudiger swore the largest oath permitted in those sacred precincts, for he asseverated “by St. Gall” that no stranger in their conventual habit should be around the cloisters at night. Salomon offered endless apologies, and promised to secure permission from the abbot before he wore the surplice again. And he even turned his discomfiture into a partial victory by begging Rudiger to present this request in his behalf. The petition, so voiced, came duly before the “senate” of that monkish republic, which happened, unfortunately for the avaricious and rapacious Salomon, to include his four opposers—“Hartmann, who composed the melody to the Sanctus humili prece; Notker the Stammerer, who made Sequences; Ratpert, who wrote Ardua spes mundi, and Tutilo, who was the author of Hodie cantandus.” These men finally allowed him to come in as usual, provided he would entirely demit his canon’s raiment, and be nothing but a Benedictine monk while within the walls.

Somehow Salomon conceded even this, and one day brought a splendid gift—a gold box encrusted with jewels and containing relics—which he offered to the abbey. All this looked in the direction that the monks feared; and they therefore rejected his present with some scorn. But it did not take long to lift Salomon the Simonist to the Abbacy of Reichenau, and then Archbishop Sfortto contrived at length to secure the wealthy St. Gall for his favorite. Thus Salomon, the detested, became, in spite of all opposition, the abbot of that celebrated cloister.

But St. Gall itself had always prospered, apparently as the sun does according to the theories of some astronomers, for it had been continually receiving cometary accessions that dropped into it unexpectedly. One such was an antiphonary, which, on the principle that “to him that hath shall be given,” fell into the hands of these musical monks through the burning of the Abbey of Jumieges in 851. This was the true origin of the “sequence.” It solved the problem of Notker in a novel manner when he finally examined it, for he had been puzzled at the immense prolongation of the final syllable ia in the Alleluia, which was sung to cover the retreat of the deacon as he ascended to the rood-loft to chant the Gospel. This Alleluia came between the Epistle and the Gospel, and as the deacon had some space to traverse, the ia was nearly interminable; for even a very few seconds became on such an occasion a most perceptible and wearisome interval of time.

This Jumieges antiphonary, in which words were fitted to the Gregorian tones, suggested another treatment of the difficulty. Notker consequently composed the Laudes Deo concinat, and afterward the Coluber Adae male suasor. Iso, his master, approved of them, and Maengal afterward gave him considerable help. The “sequence” in its standard form had a “note to each syllable,” as in modern church music. And this was the beginning of that Book of Sequences perfected by him in 887, and which has gained a merited prominence for the name of Notker Balbulus.

Ekkehard tells certain legends (which may or may not be trustworthy) regarding the suggestion whence some of these sprung. The droning rotation of a slow mill-wheel gave rise, he says, to the sequence Sancti Spiritus adsit nobis gratia; and this is far more credible than the additional information that Notker sent it to “the Emperor” Charles and got back the famous Veni Creator Spiritus—a story which Mabillon utterly confutes. This Emperor was certainly not Charles the Great—who was long ago dead—and it might have been Charles “the Bald” or Charles “the Fat” (the usurper), or Charles “the Simple,” but there seems an antecedent improbability that any such nickname could belong to the grave and great poet of that splendid hymn. And, indeed, we are now positive that it is the composition of Rabanus Maurus, Bishop of Mayence (Mainz), who died in 856.

There is probably some show of reason in the idea that the groaning machinery of a mill should have helped to originate the extended notes of the sequence. The picturesqueness of the story is really its best claim to our notice. I well remember a mill by which I used often to pause in the stillness of night, listening to the wailing protracted cadences of the huge wheel which slowly turned in its bed as the buckets successively filled from the shut, but leaky gates. Hearing this, and comparing it with the “sequence” of the Catholic service, or with the long-drawn tones of a German choral, it is impossible not to be struck by the resemblance.

Then there is another story—indeed, there are several in the Latin which could scarcely be inserted here—but there is certainly one other which both Baring-Gould and Maitland have had sufficient geniality to extract. It refers to the manner in which Notker, Ratpert, and Tutilo—“the three inseparables”—attended to the eavesdropping of one of Abbot Salomon’s spies. This spy was Sindolf, the refectorarius, or steward, a sour-visaged, crab-appleish kind of man, who was never so happy as when he had an evil speech to retail. He particularly delighted in fretting the temper of the abbot with reference to these poets and musicians, but they suspected his design and “set a watch because of him.”

One evening after “lauds” the three were in the “writing-room” (scriptorium) where the manuscripts were prepared and kept, busy with their conversation and having thereto the permission of the prior. Sindolf sniffed scandal in the air, and flattened his ear against the opaque glass, where a convenient crack suffered him to listen to their words. It was night, and Tutilo, a shrewd, lively fellow (homo pervicax), was glad enough to get this occasion against the slinking traitor. In the Acta Sanctorum, and again in Mabillon, copied into the one hundred and thirty-first volume of Migne, we have old Ekkehard’s grim report of this monkish fun.

“There he is with his ear to the glass,” cried Tutilo. “Do you, Notker, because you are a timid little chap (timidulus), go away into the church. But Ratpert, my friend, take down the whip that hangs in the chimney corner and run out-doors. And then comfort my heart (cor meum confortare) by laying on to him with all your might (esto robustus). For I, when you get close enough, will throw open the window in a hurry, catch him by the hair and hang on with a will” (ad me pertractum violenter tenebo). Off went the timorous Notker; out slipped the cheerful Ratpert; open went the window, and the vigorous Tutilo clutched Sindolf by ears and hair together! Then Ratpert rained on the lashes (a dorso ingrandinat), and Sindolf twisted and howled and kicked, and lights began to fly around, and the brethren came running. But Tutilo held on and called for a light and shouted that he had caught the devil; while Ratpert vanished into the night and Notker had entirely disappeared in the church. “Where are Notker and Ratpert?” was the first question. “Oh, they smelled the devil and ran away to ask succor from heaven,” said Tutilo. “And here was I, left to do the best I could with this thing that walks in darkness. And I believe an angel has been sent to chastise him in the rear!”

The sneaky Sindolf was completely abashed, but his temper did not improve under the chastisement. Even Salomon, his patron, laughed at him along with the others, which made the matter worse. So one day, finding a beautiful copy of the Canonical Epistles in Greek which Liutward, Bishop of Vercelli, had sent as a present to Notker, what does the malicious wretch do but cut it to pieces with his knife! Ekkehard adds that the mutilated copy could still be seen in the library of St. Gall.

These two worthies, Ratpert and Tutilo, heartily deserve the place which Ekkehard accords them in his life of Notker. Ratpert walked usually between Notker and Tutilo; a very punctual, studious man who “wore out two pairs of shoes in the year;” a man who seldom left the abbey walls, and who regarded “expeditions” as being to the full “as dangerous as kisses;” a negligent fellow about the offices and masses, claiming that he taught them often enough to his pupils; and finally, a composer of good litanies; dying October 25th, A.D. 900.

Tutilo was a capital companion; genial and ingenious; capable of music on all sorts of pipes and fiddles; who told a good story and made many a good joke; active and agile in his figure, and withal a fine carver, painter, and goldsmith. Some of his ivory carving still exists in the town library of St. Gall—so one historian records in a foot-note—and he was evidently a most skilful musician, whose hymn tunes, composed on the rota, or small harp (the minstrel’s instrument in those days), were always acceptable. He wrote Hodie cantandus, Omnium virtutum gemmis, and Viri Galilaei. This last he sent to “King Charles,” who himself composed a tune to which Tutilo set words called Quoniam Dominus. His royal patron liked him well. “Curse the man,” he said one day, “he is altogether too good a fellow to be a monk!” Ekkehard adds to this list of compositions the sequence Gaudete et cantate as a specimen of Tutilo’s ability in a slightly different direction of music, declaring that “any one who understands music” will notice and appreciate the distinction.

Hartmann was abbot after Salomon; a most learned man, and one who perhaps contributed more to the development of the “sequence” than we are now able to prove.

Of Notker it is only fair to say that he gave to himself the name Balbus, or Stammerer, which was changed, owing apparently to his small stature, into the diminutive, Balbulus. When Innocent III. asked Uadalric, then Abbot of St. Gall, what rank Notker had held in the convent, the abbot replied that he was only “a simple monk,” but was born of noble parents and was thoroughly holy and well educated. On which the Pope declared that they were wretched and wicked people (nequissimi), and would suffer for it (infelices eritis) if they did not celebrate the festival of this man who had been “so full of the Holy Spirit.” Julius II. commanded Hugo, Bishop of Constance, to inquire into the matter. The result established him as a beatified confessor, and so distinguished him by the prefix “Blessed” from Notker “the Abbot,” who was his nephew, and died 973; Notker “the Physician,” who died 1033; Notker “of Liege,” who died 1007, and Notker “Labeo,” who died 1022. B. Notker Balbulus himself died in 912. Salomon, who was then his abbot, died in 919, and in 921 Hartmann succeeded to the dignity.

It would not be difficult to add to this account several superstitious stories; how Notker broke his staff over a dog-devil which went howling through the church; how he had some difficulty with another demon who intermeddled with pen and ink; how he severely handled a flagitious monk; and, generally, how he proved to be a moderate worker of miracles and a pleasant colleague to the other cenobites.

But we turn with a peculiar interest to that little sequence which has made his name immortal. This Media vita in morte sumus is the one which meets us in the Burial Service of the Protestant Episcopal Church:

“In the midst of life we are in death:

Of whom may we seek for succor

But of thee, O Lord,

Who for our sins art justly displeased?”

It is there found in connection with a passage from the Book of Job, and is followed by the Sancte Deus; Sancte fortis; Sancte et misericors Salvator, Amarae morti ne tradas nos; which is in our translation, “Yet, O Lord most holy, O Lord most mighty, O holy and most merciful Saviour, deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal death.” All that Notker originally composed is that which is first mentioned above. The rest came about as we shall presently see.

The Rev. F. Proctor, in his History of the Book of Common Prayer, states that this brief sequence—of which he does not appear to know the origin—“was formed from an antiphon which was sung at Compline during a part of Lent.” There is also a singular misapprehension by which the “samphire gatherers” hanging over the cliffs of England at their “dreadful trade” were credited with the suggestion. It was formerly supposed that Notker watched them during their dangerous toil, and so, by another equally strange inadvertence, the fact was taken as a proof that he must have been himself a native or resident of Britain. This, like the other legend of the twenty-year debate upon sequences, proves on inquiry to have no foundation in fact. The story itself is a sufficient explanation without any coloring whatever. It reveals to us the poetic spirit of the devout man who beheld his fellow-creatures poised between life and death, and wrote this short and exquisite meditation thereon.

“The holy Notker,” says Canisius, “made the ‘prose’ of the following lament when the bridge [over the chasm] at Martinstobel was being constructed in a precipitous and most dangerous place. But who added the ‘verses’ I do not know. I have quoted it from a most ancient codex, where it is set to modern notes.” He then proceeds to give it in the ordinary form. It is, as he says, a prose, and must be distinguished from verses of regular metre:

“Media vita in morte sumus, quem quaerimus adjutorem, nisi te, Domine, qui pro peccatis nostris juste irasceris.”

Thus far Notker. Then occur the “verses” in three stanzas:

“Ah homo, perpende fragilis,

Mortalis, et instabilis,

Quod vitare non poteris

Mortem, quocunque ieris.

Aufert te, saepissime,

Dum vivis libentissime.

Sancte deus.

“Vae calamitas inediae,

Vermis fremit invidiae,

Dum audit flentem animam

Mortalis esse utinam!

Nec Christi fati gladius,

Transiret, et non alius,

Sancte fortis.

“Heu nil valet nobilitas

Neque sedis sublimitas,

Nil generis potentia,

Nil rerum affluentia,

Plus pura conscientia

Valet mundi scientia.

Sancte et misericors Salvator,

Amarae morti ne tradas nos.”

It is perfectly plain, then, that this “third sequence”—the Media vita being the second—is derived from the “verses” whose authorship Canisius cannot discover, and the date of which cannot be far from the fourteenth century.

But when we imagine the good monk watching the workmen from the brink of the Goldach, which hurries down through St. Gall toward the Boden-See, we can bring to mind the whole picture. The present bridge is one hundred and sixteen feet long and fully one hundred in height from the swift little stream. It is of wood, and was constructed in 1468. Here, dizzily balancing in mid-air, tradition says that a man, even as Notker gazed, lost his footing and plunged into the abyss. The eternities came together! A spark from the infinite kindled within the poet’s soul. Heaven from on high beheld this single life suddenly hurled to ruin. Earth from beneath reached up and seized upon the thing of earth. And thus it was with us every moment! In the midst of life we were in death, and from none could we seek for help save from God alone—that God, displeased at sinners, who is the sinner’s only hope!

Standing once before the graves at Gettysburg, the tall gaunt figure of Abraham Lincoln paused upon such an eternal edge. His soul took in at one sweep the heroic past and the historic future. And those words which came, so men assure us, almost without premeditation from his lips are the noblest utterance of our time. That compact, terse, brief expression is the essence of national strength. The phrases are vivid with a supernatural brightness: “Government of the people, for the people, by the people must not perish from the earth.” It was so with Notker; and now, wherever that beautiful service is uttered above the dead, the forgotten monk of St. Gall speaks with a voice which touches unaltering humanity, and utters that grave, great thought, preciously protected in its small casket of language, that death is beneath and God is above, and that all our hope must come from Him!

CHAPTER XIV.
WALAFRID STRABO.

Among the pupils of Rabanus Maurus was a boy afflicted with strabismus. He was cross-eyed, or crooked-eyed in some manner, and this fixed upon him the name of Strabo the “squinter.” Like many another monk in that age, he has so sunk himself into his service as to have become a man without a country and almost without parentage. Some therefore contend that he was an Anglo-Saxon, once a monk in London and afterward educated at St. Gall, Reichenau, and Fulda. An obscure tradition even makes him a relative of the Venerable Bede. Another story assigns him to Haymo’s family. Now, Haymo was a monk of Fulda about 850, a man of very liberal opinions, learned, and truly catholic, especially in his denial of the universal authority of the Pope and the doctrine of transubstantiation. It is something of an honor to have been this man’s brother, and it is no discredit to have been related to Bede. At any rate these guesses—for they are little else—serve to show us the repute in which Walafrid Strabo was held.

More accurate investigation reveals a sentence in the preface to the life of St. Gall which seems conclusive. In it Walafrid speaks of “us Germans or Suabians.” Suabia is thus designated as his birthplace, and we find his name among the list of those scholars who did credit to their teacher Rabanus.

His period is the middle of the ninth century, for in 842 he became Abbot of Reichenau in the diocese of Constance, and he died in 849. Dates like these are not hard to verify, for we have many chronicles and records in which the Dark Ages laid the foundations of authentic history. Here lie away in their narrow niches of brief reference many illustrious people. And the work of the hymnologist consists often enough in the same sort of research as secular history demands. Now and then on the dead breast there is a little withered flower ready to crumble into dust.

That curious, peering Trithemius—to whom we are indebted for such laborious inquiries concerning the men of this time—maintains that Walafrid was “rector” of the school in the monastery of Hirschfeld. If this be so it only confirms what we note again and again, that Alcuin and Rabanus were the real instigators of German scholarship. And the work from which we shall presently quote becomes more interesting to us for this reason.

Walafrid left a long catalogue of works behind him. He wrote a valuable antiquarian treatise on the divine offices and usages of the Church. Besides, he is accredited as the author of the lives of St. Gall, St. Othmar, St. Blaithmac, St. Mamma, and St. Leudegaris. He also composed various poems; a preface to the Life of Ludwig the Pious, and a condensation of Rabanus Maurus’s Commentary on Leviticus. He compiled the famous Glossa Ordinaria, which remained the standard commentary on the Bible throughout the Middle Ages. He began the annals of Fulda, which have since been continued by competent hands, notably those of Christopher Brower. He has been called a “pretty good poet for his age”—by which is meant that there was a scanty supply of poetry in the ninth century—a fact which no one is competent to dispute.

It goes without saying that his life was the life of an ecclesiast, restricted to a Chinese minuteness of ritual, and permitting only such visits and journeys as religious business justified. His death occurred on one of these infrequent expeditions. It was in France, whither he had gone—as we are expressly told—in order to hasten some ecclesiastical affair.

These are the meagre and unentertaining facts connected with the name of Walafrid Strabo. He would not have deserved, nor would he have received our notice if two of his hymns (the Laudem beatae martyris and the Gloriam nato cecinere) had not been preserved. These entitle him to mention, and he promptly rises to genuine importance if we can agree with Kellner (see Bibliotheca Sacra, January, 1883, p. 154), that a recently discovered “diary” is from his pen. It is probable that, whether it be authentic or not, it is strictly accurate in its relation of the studies pursued in those schools. And if we assume it to be credible we can revise our dates to correspond.

Thus his school life began in 816, and after its close he went to Fulda, thence to return to his old monastery in 842 as its abbot. These dates are afforded by the document itself, which was originally published in 1857, as a part of the educational report of the Benedictine school of St. Maria of Einsiedeln in Switzerland. It appears to me that its tone and composition are not such as to justify the value which Kellner sets upon it. Walafrid’s name was a convenient one, and this is doubtless no more nor less than a clever historical romance. But it has been composed in the very neighborhood of the scenes it depicts, and the advantages of all the ancient MSS. and traditions have been incalculably great.

The narrative is introduced by a modern preface which speaks of St. Meinrad, the founder of Einsiedeln, as a contemporary of Walafrid. Then we have a statement which tersely exhibits the plan and purpose of the story:

“In the dark hour when the Roman imperial throne collapsed on which Theodoric the Goth had just seated his teacher Avitus, Manlius Boethius committed his spiritual wealth to the Goth Cassiodorus, who transmitted it to the sons of St. Benedict,” etc.

“The seed of Christian instruction had been inherited by the sons of St. Benedict from the age of martyrs and holy fathers. Great seminaries were opened at Fulda, Weissenberg in the bishopric of Speyer, St. Alban in Mainz, St. Gall, Reichenau in the bishopric of Constance, St. Maximin, and St. Matthias in Trier, etc. To these establishments the sons of the nobility resorted, while the Benedictines were their teachers and fathers. Whoever saw one of these schools saw them all as to everything essential. Accordingly, it is our purpose to describe one of them—namely, the school of Reichenau, from which came the founder of Einsiedeln, St. Meinrad, and Walafrid Strabo, who was his schoolmate in Reichenau, and who, four years after him, assumed the Benedictine dress.”

Then follows an assurance to the “intelligent reader” that this account “is not mere poetry,” but is “sustained by authoritative documents,” among which are named the writings of Walafrid himself, of Bede, Alcuin, Rabanus, and the collections of Pez, Metzler, and others. It is plain, then, that Kellner has been misled, and that Professor J. D. Butler, of Madison, Wis., who has made this clever translation from the German, has been likewise deceived. Yet the historical importance of the “diary” remains, and the writings of Alcuin, Bede, and Rabanus, with those of Walafrid, give the original particulars and can be cited in proof. Professor Butler adds a few pleasant details about Reichenau. It was founded in 724, earlier than any neighboring convent except St. Gall. It is on an island in the Lake of Constance, whose lake-girt limits are about two miles by three. It became so rich that it acquired many other properties, and its abbot could journey to Rome and never sleep a night outside of his own domain. The old tower, built by Henry the Black, is still standing, and among the cherished relics of the abbey is a piece of green glass weighing twenty-eight pounds given by Charlemagne, who thought it to be an emerald. There is also a supposititious water-pot from Cana of Galilee, which evidently came from Palestine and shows the mediaeval intercourse with the Holy Land. The revenues of the abbey were not sequestrated until the year 1799. Such is a brief sketch of this religious house which we shall again encounter in the story of Hermannus Contractus.

Walafrid’s narrative begins with the year 815. He saw the vast buildings with surprise and was greeted by a throng of future schoolmates. His teacher had several boys under his care to teach them to read. This he did by the help of a wax tablet—the old Roman method. The letters were scratched on the wax and erased by the blunt end of the pointed “style.” Along with this elementary work came Latin, together with a German primer—in both of which the boys were expected to read.

At harvest time there was a short vacation. The boys rambled through the fields and picked fruit and enjoyed themselves generally.

The second year’s work was the learning of conversational Latin. This was the language of daily intercourse and was employed to express all wants. The grammar of Donatus was studied under a pupil-teacher, and the cases and tenses were rigidly committed to memory. The rod was the penalty for misbehavior. German phrases were translated into Latin and some portion of biblical history was repeated to the scholars at night, which they were obliged to tell again in the morning.

Then follows a description of the dedication of the minster and of the solemn effect of the great High Mass, at which time Walafrid resolves to become a monk.

The year 817 was occupied with grammar and orthography, and the use of Latin was compulsory. Hitherto there had been a trifle of laxity and a few lapses into German were forgiven. Now there was no exception to scholars of this advancement. They wrote from dictation upon their tablets, and the Psalter was in this manner transcribed and memorized.

The fourth year (818) was signalized by the planting of the first grape-vine on the island. Doubtless the fact itself is authentic, and is here introduced owing to its date. And in this year the scholars attack prosody. They study Alcuin (who wrote many verses), and the distichs of Cato, and Bede’s De Arte Metrica. The earlier Christian poets—Prosper and Juvencus and Sedulius—are mentioned. It is strange that the author does not name Prudentius, who was far more of a classic than any or all of these three. But it is quite correct to mention Virgil as a permitted book, and the exercises in poetry in which all were engaged.

In 819, the fifth year, the boys became pupil-teachers themselves. They were further instructed in rhetoric, with illustrations from the Bible to be paralleled from Statius and Lucan, whose works they were studying. Other scholars again were set to work as scribes and copyists. The amusements were the running of foot-races, quarter-staff playing, and “dice,” by which we are probably to understand the very ancient game of backgammon. And again, it is strange that no mention is made of the games of ball, which were decidedly common in those days.

The year 820 is consumed with rhetoric—with Cicero, Quintilian, and the histories of Bede, Eusebius, Jerome, and others. The classic authors were Sallust and Livy, with Virgil and (at last) Prudentius and Fortunatus.

In 821 comes Boethius, attended by more of Cassiodorus, and the pleasant pastime of “dialectics,” or debating. In these debates the enthusiasm was kindled for future controversies. And in other lines—as, for example, in studies of the current legal codes, of the Salic and Ripuarian Franks and Lombards—those who were to be rulers were diligently trained. Here (for this is the exact account of that ancient instruction) we see how the Church held sway over her former pupils, and how the pupils became by and by the exponents of religious opinions and subservient to ecclesiastical decrees.

With 822 we have mention of rhetoric and logic, with oral and written exercises, and in 823 the scholars took up and pursued the studies of geometry and geography according to the light of that period. Then came music with the various instruments, as organ, harp, flute, or trombone. Finally, Walafrid is supposed to record his initiation into the reading of Greek. From the MS. of Homer the boys were instructed, and the account closes abruptly with a reference to the study of astronomy.

Subsequent to this year, 825, Walafrid is believed to have passed considerable time at Fulda with Rabanus Maurus.

These were the ideas and educational methods of that period. Outside of the monasteries and abbeys there was nothing that went on in the way of learning. It needed special establishments, with great wealth, the protection of kings and nobles, and the indefinable terrors of religious authority to perpetuate scholarship. We may despise, as some writers freely do despise, the bigotry and intolerance which obliterated fine manuscripts of the classics to make room for monkish trifles. But we cannot fail to discover the germs of the new poetry of the Church in these unpromising times. Fortunatus and Prudentius were no bad preceptors after all. And even if Walafrid Strabo was not much of a poet, he has served our occasion as a pupil when he might not have gained notice as a writer of hymns.

CHAPTER XV.
HERMANNUS CONTRACTUS AND THE “VENI SANCTE SPIRITUS.”

One of the surprises of history is the long-delayed honor which comes to the modest and the meek. The notable and prominent attract to themselves much of the repute of any age. They even gain the credit of achievements to which they never put a finger. But by and by the “whirligig of time brings in his revenges,” and they that were last become first.

Thoughts like these are sure to come to us when we encounter such a name as this of the poor cripple of Reichenau. Whatever fame he had in his own day gradually disappeared and he has been only a shadowy figure for many years. It is true that Ersch and Gruber, in their great encyclopaedia, say of him that he is “one of the most meritorious men of the eleventh century.” It is also true that Ussermann—himself an almost forgotten authority—has labored to give Hermann his proper meed of praise; and that the Benedictines have patiently collated many little particulars concerning him. Yet he still remains locked up in Latin or in German or in French; and English readers can be pardoned for being utterly ignorant of him and of his works.

This man merits no small share of our notice. He came of good blood, for his father was the Count of Vöhringen in Suabia. He traced his kinship to the famous St. Udalric, whose sister, named Leutgarde, is mentioned (971) in the saintly bishop’s pages. Her son was Reginbald, slain in battle against the Hungarians in 955. This Reginbald had a daughter Bertha, who married Wolfrad, Count of Vöhringen, and died in 1032. Wolfrad, dying in 1010, had a son Wolfrad, who married a lady named Hiltrude and became the father of fifteen children—one of whom was Hermann. This is the simplest form of a genealogy, which the learned chronicler protracts in a marvellous manner, to the great confusion of the modern mind. I have not cared to follow him into the remoter affinities and alliances which add distinction to the poor little paralytic child, who at seven years of age was carried to the great school at St. Gall.

I have said that Hermann was a cripple. He was so completely helpless, indeed, that he could not move without assistance; and his days and nights were full of pain. He was “hump-backed and bow-breasted, crippled and lame.” (Gibosus ante et retro, et contractus, claudus. Pertz: Monumenta: Scriptores: V., 268.) But his mind triumphed over these infirmities. A pathetic legend concerning him assures us that in the visions of the night the Virgin stood before him, radiant and beautiful. As in the old story about the choice of Hercules—which was probably the origin of this—she offers him strength of body combined with ignorance and weakness of mind; or wisdom and ability in a body which should be deficient and sickly to the day of his death. This “second Hercules”—as the chronicler admiringly calls him—promptly chose the last.

He had been born (for his ancestral records and his own Chronicon help us to exactness) on July 18th, 1013. He was admitted to school, probably, though not certainly, at St. Gall, on September 15th, 1020. Hitherto his education had been absolutely neglected. He could not go about alone nor even speak intelligibly (Annales Augustani [1042-55]. In Pertz: Mon. Ger., VII., 126) owing to his paralysis. But he had a devouring desire for knowledge, and rapidly mastered Latin, Greek, Arabic, and (probably) Hebrew, so that he possessed them equally well with his vernacular speech. The convent was the only place for such a poor little waif as he, and thus, within the learned cloisters of St. Gall, he followed reverently upon the shining path of Notker and Tutilo and Ratpert and Hartmann, and added his name to theirs in the development of the sequences and antiphons of the Church.

Nor was this all. He became an excellent historian, a distinguished musician, and a renowned philosopher and theologian. In mathematics he was equally skilled and ingenious. He is considered by some to have invented the astrolabe, the first instrument by which the height and distances of stars were calculated. Assuredly he wrote an exhaustive treatise upon its use, whether he originated it or not; and it is said that he added to his scientific studies the making of clocks and watches. He has left us essays upon the monochord, on the squaring of the circle, on computation and physiognomy and metrical rules and astronomy. These are marked by the inferior attainments of the age, as we might expect, but they display an amount of original research for which we are unprepared.

He was also an excellent scribe, and the library of St. Gall still contains a copy of a work ascribed to Anselm of Canterbury written by him in the fulfilment of a vow. He resembled the Venerable Bede in the universality of his knowledge, and, like Alcuin and Rabanus Maurus, he is one of the great teachers of his time. Always, during these darkening years, there appears to have been some ministering priest in the temple of education—some self-devoted, God-fearing man, who patiently kept the altar-fire burning, and spent his life, to the utmost verge, in climbing those altar-steps with fresh fuel for the flame.

We do not know how much of this work was begun or completed during his life at St. Gall. We are able to say that he translated Aristotle’s Poetics and Rhetoric from the Arabic language, and this of itself should award to him the very highest renown. It is impossible in a single sentence to do justice to this achievement and we must take it more at large.

The dictator Sylla brought the works of the great Greek philosopher, together with his library, to Rome, in the year B.C. 147. This was on the capture of Athens, and these writings were still comparatively unknown in Greece. The philosophy of the Peripatetic school was, of course, familiar to their countrymen; but it was by and through the Latin race and not the Greek, that the “Master of Syllogisms” was to become most potent. Aristotle’s was the controlling system of the Middle Ages. His rules of logic were imperative. They governed theology, and indeed every other form of metaphysics. They restrained with an iron grip the expanding ideas of men. It was against Aristotle, in the person of William of Champeaux, future Bishop of Chalons and founder of the school of St. Victor, that Peter Abelard laid his lance in rest. Even to the days of Dean Swift these ideas bore sway, and when that brilliant man sought his degree from Trinity College, Dublin, he was met by the question whether he reasoned according to Aristotle. And his reply, that he did well enough in his own fashion, was held to be little less than atheism. Nor is this the only comparison which might be aptly instituted between Swift and Abelard.

So Aristotle had his authority and held his sceptre down almost to our own time. But at the commencement his writings were either used in the Greek language or in the Arabic. In the twelfth century the schools of the Moors in Spain were the true centre of philosophy. They first applied his teachings to theology, and to these schools resorted many scholars from other parts of the continent. But such translations as these travelling students brought home were probably of a sort to make intricacy and subtlety more intricate and subtle. A fog had gathered over Europe, and the Dark Ages are indeed no myth. There were few points of light anywhere, and among these few were the bright spots called St. Gall and Reichenau.

Charles Jourdain asserts that only a part of Aristotle was known before 1200 A.D., and that this was through the translation of Boethius. (See Ueberweg: Hist. Philos., I., 367.) So that if Hermannus Contractus translated Aristotle at so early a date, it shows that his rendering was in advance of most, if not of nearly all those which were used in the Western schools. He had a brother, or uncle, Manegold, who died in Palestine. He had another brother Werner, who afterward became a legate to Gregory VII. (Hildebrand) in the fierce struggle between Pope and Emperor in 1077. And he was further well placed both by his family connections and his situation at a centre of learning, to secure the best manuscripts and the best Arabic instruction. (See an elaborate dissertation in Wegelin: Thes. Rerum Suevicarum, II., p. 120.) It evinces decided wisdom and toil on his part to have undertaken and completed this translation; and there is no doubt that the humble paralytic from his bed of suffering influenced materially the scholastic movements of the coming centuries. Could he have seen the swarming thousands who built the abbey of the Paraclete; could he have witnessed in vision the uprising of such schools as St. Victor in France and Oxford in England; could he have heard Roger Bacon confess his indebtedness to those pages; could he have foreseen the infinite consequences both to the preservation and the hindrance of human thought, with what strange zeal he would have traced each painful line!

But he could not know it. He had removed at thirty years of age to his perpetual celibacy at Reichenau—Augia the Rich, as it is called in the Latin tongue. It is built on an island in the western arm of the Lake of Constance. And there, with great mountains to gaze upon and fair waters to catch for him the rosy light of evening; with the brethren of the convent laboring cheerfully in their fields or toiling in their cells, Hermann of Vöhringen, Hermann of Reichenau, Hermannus Contractus, Hermann der Gebrechliche, Hermann the Cripple, spent his uneventful life.

Here he wrote the legends of some of the saints, and here he prepared his valuable compendium of universal history. He calls it a Chronicon, and condensed into its records the story of the world from A.D. 1 to the year 1054, the date of his own death. It is very brief through the first portion of its account of “the Six Ages.” Then its statements are fuller. When it reaches contemporaneous events it becomes exceedingly important to the historical student, for it is in the nature of a chronicle. Here also the man’s own personality occasionally appears. He speaks of Reichenau as Augia nostra and mentions the basilica which Henry III. (“the Black”) has erected to “our patron, St. Mark the Evangelist.” This establishes the fact that Reichenau was his true residence, and gives us the standpoint of the little isle in Lake from which to look out across the dark-green and sometimes stormy waters upon the confusions of the time. These were the days when the Truce of God (1041 A.D.) was necessary in order to prevent the bloody feuds of the barons during Advent, Lent, and from Wednesday evening of each week until the following Monday morning. Yet amid all these conflicts Hermann the Paralytic remained secure, guarded by religion and surrounded by the peaceful lake. And like that lake the Rhine stream of secular affairs flowed always through his life clear and undisturbed.

It is during these closing scenes that a touching entry is made in the pages of the Chronicon. Under the year 1052 the crippled hand slowly traces these words: “At the same time, on January 9th, my mother Hiltrude, the wife of the Count Wolfrad, a pious, meek, generous, and religious woman, and one who was as devoted to and happy in her husband and her seven surviving children as any person could be, closed the last day of her life in about the sixty-first year of her age and the forty-fourth of her marriage, and was buried at the Villa of Altshausen, in a sepulchre under the chapel of St. Udalric which she had herself constructed.” And then follows a brief poem in which the merits and the love of this dear mother are affectionately told.

Hermann, on the best of testimony, was a person of just this amiable and beautiful spirit. He is called hilarissimus, as if to show his great cheerfulness. He was always a strict vegetarian in his diet. He hated injustice; scorned every sort of vice—and Heaven alone knows how much there then was of nameless wickedness!—and finally, he was thoroughly free from all envy and malice. It is a curious testimony to his breadth of mind that one of his biographers says of him (quoting the old adage), that he regarded nothing human as alien to his search.

He preserved this calmness and sweetness of temper to the farthest limit of his days. Not long before he died he said to his faithful friend, Berthold of Constance, “Do not, I say, do not ask me about this; but rather attend to what I will tell you, for in you I do not a little confide. I shall die doubtless in a very short time. I shall not live. I shall not get well.” He added that he was so “seized with an ineffable desire and delight toward that intransitory world and that eternal and immortal life,” that all things of this passing existence seemed empty and vain and dropped like motes (flocci) from him, in the breath of that heavenly air.

And then he proceeded to detail a vision in which he fancied himself reading and rereading the Hortensius of Cicero. His mind was clear; his hopes for religion and for education were high; but all was now over and he must depart. Therefore he quietly and pathetically ends by saying, “Taedet quidem me vivere”—indeed it is wearisome to me to live. And thus, on September 24th, 1054, he ceased from earth—in his forty-second year, and having carried the story of the world down to the end of his own career.

But his works follow him. I do most firmly believe him—and not Robert the Second—to have been the author of the Veni Sancte Spiritus.

The first person to attribute this hymn to the King of France is Durand, (Rationale Divinorum Officiorum, Lib. IV.) His book treats of ceremonial observances and is among the rarest of printed volumes. The splendid copy upon vellum in the Astor Library is not only beautiful in itself, but it is extremely valuable as the third specimen of typography in existence. Only two works—one of them the Bible and another the Psalter of Mainz—had been previously printed from movable types. I have personally verified the reference and its English rendering is as follows:

“Notker, Abbot of St. Gall, in Germany, first composed sequences with notes of his own in the Alleluia. And Nicholaus the Pope [Nicholas II., 1059-1061] granted that they should be sung at masses. But Hermannus Contractus, a German, inventor of the astrolabe, composed these sequences: Rex omnipotens and Sancti Spiritus and Ave Maria and the antiphons Alma redemptoris mater and Simon Barjona. Peter, Bishop of Compostella, made the Salve regina. And the King of France, Robert by name, composed the sequence, Veni Sancte Spiritus and the hymn Chorus novae Hierusalem.”

It is hard to crowd into a paragraph more errors than are in this. Notker was not Abbot of St. Gall. Innocent III. was very severe upon Udalric of St. Gall, because such a spiritual and able man had lived and died unhonored among them; a simple monk whose labors and death received no special attention in their religious year.

Nor did Hermann write the Sancti Spiritus adsit; for this, on the best of testimony, was Notker’s. It was so sung at Rome under Innocent III.; and Ekkehard the Younger, in his history of Notker, pointedly claims it for him.

It is very doubtful whether Hermann invented the astrolabe for measuring the distances of stars. His two treatises are upon its use, and he is evidently very familiar with it. But it was first made serviceable in navigation by the Portuguese—if we are to believe Evelyn (in his Navigation)—and the study of astronomy was greatly cultivated by the Arabic schools in Spain and elsewhere about this period. J. A. Fabricius indeed mentions that the astrolabe was “commonly employed in the days of Ptolemy.”

The Ave Maria is supposed by Koch to belong to the thirteenth century and some have ascribed it to Adam of St. Victor. It is, perhaps, by Heribert of Eichstettin (died 1042). Hermann wrote the Ave praeclara maris stella, which might have been mistaken for this other.

The Salve regina is assigned by Durand to Peter of Compostella. Gerbert names several possible authors, but evidently follows the leadership of Durand. (De Cantu, etc., II., 27.) And yet Trithemius, with every really critical scholar, credits it to Hermann. It is exhaustively considered by Wegelin and definitely conceded to him. (Thes. Rerum Suevicarum, II., p. 120 ff.)

Robert the Second cannot claim the Chorus novae Hierusalem. It is the production of Fulbert of Chartres (died 1029), and is included without question in every complete edition of his works.

Thus the absolute authority of Durand is much shaken. He was a lawyer in the thirteenth century, who studied at Bologna and taught at Modena; a legate of Pope Martin IV.; dean of the church at Chartres, and Bishop of Mende. The fact that he was dean of Chartres, and yet ascribes the Chorus Novae, not to Fulbert but to Hermannus, is suggestive, but not convincing.

So Durand was the first person to affix the name of Robert II. to the Veni Sancte. Trithemius comes next in order; the Abbot of Spanheim; historian and scholar; indefatigable in researches, but erratic and prejudiced; born 1462 and dying 1516. His true name is Johann von Trittenheim and we derive this, and other information about authors and their works, from his Liber de Scriptoribus Ecclesiasticis—a biographical dictionary like those of Jerome, Gennadius, and Isidore, to whose works he really furnishes an Appendix. Egon (sometimes known as Ego) in his account of Reichenau’s distinguished men (De Viris illustribus Augiae divitis, quoted by Pez: Thesaurus Anecdotorum, I., 3; 68. Cf. Migne, 143) declares that Trithemius was “unjustly hostile to the monks of Reichenau” in asserting that “our Hermannus” was from St. Gall, when even Metzler conceded, on behalf of his own convent, that Hermann had changed his residence from St. Gall to Reichenau. Be this as it may, the positive statement of Trithemius, which gives the Veni Sancte to Robert II. instead of to Hermann, has been generally accepted. Cardinal Bona (1677), Louis Archon (1704-11), and others agree with him.

But there is a break in the continuity of faith. Clichtove—an authority much esteemed—expresses no opinion about the author of the Veni Sancte further than to say quisquis is fuerit—whoever he was.

Rambach, in his Anthology, comes now to the rescue. (Anthologie, I., 227.) He says it is “ganz unstreitig von Robert;” and all the German critics, with the single exception of Daniel, have followed this authority blindly. Whatever the Germans said has usually been enough for the English. Therefore the Veni Sancte is in every collection attributed, without a shadow of doubt, to Robert the King.

There should have been less positiveness about this if the accurate Daniel had been noticed more carefully. He praises the language of Clichtove, who says that the author, “whoever he was,” must have been “inwardly filled with light,” and he italicizes the quisquis is fuerit. But as Robert, with only three others, appears to have escaped the wreck of the sequences in the sixteenth century, even Daniel allows the Veni Sancte to him; and Archbishop Trench finds that “there exists no good reason why we should question” that Robert wrote it.

We may dismiss any conjectures about Innocent III. having been its author, although great efforts have been made to credit this hymn to his pen. Dom Remy Cellier and Migne seem the most strongly partisan, but their remarks and references are weak. (Scriptores Ecclesiastici, vol. xiii., p. 109, note. Also Patrologia, 141; 901.)

A sample of the general looseness of citation can be found in Kehrein (No. 125), who announces that Gerbert “holds Hermannus Contractus to be the author” of the Veni Sancte. Gerbert does nothing of the kind. He names Hermann with others. It is quite true, though, that he does not name Robert.

Setting aside Innocent III. for cause—although Brander of St. Gall, in his Index Sequentiarum, grants this to him—the authorship of the hymn rests between the king and the monk. I say “for cause,” since Innocent was at the summit of temporal power, and his position was a very tempting one to posthumous flattery. He is credited with the Ave mundi spes Mariae. He did not write the Stabat Mater, nor did he compose the Veni Sancte. Let any one examine the Ave mundi and he will renounce all hope that the man who prepared this could ever have written the others, or either of them. Besides, Wrangham is likely to be correct when he assigns this latter sequence to Adam of St. Victor. It is precisely in Adam’s style of metrical composition; it is not found before the fourteenth century, and its tone is modern. It can therefore be said that Innocent deserves no place among the Latin hymn-writers.

Now, Robert II. is much in the same condition as Innocent III. His is a shining name to which to affix popular hymns. He has been credited with the Ave maris stella—the parent of all hymns to the Virgin. The sequence Sancti Spiritus adsit is not his, on the testimony already adduced; but in the year 1110 the “ancient customs of Cluny,” collected by St. Udalric (Hermann’s ancestor) gives us this “at Pentecost” (D’Achery: Spicilegium, I., 641), with the “response,” Spiritus sanctus. This would serve to show that such praise to the Holy Spirit was usual. With the Chorus Novae we have already dealt. And the Rex omnipotens belongs to Hermann though it is ascribed to Robert—another instance of inaccuracy, which casts a ray of light upon the present problem.

Those sequences of which Robert was the possible author are printed in Migne’s Patrologia (141, 959 ff.). Only one of them merits a word of notice. It is the Te lucis auctor personent. Daniel assigns this to the fourteenth or fifteenth century, but Mone and Koch to the fifth. These last are probably right. It is early found in the Anglo-Saxon Church and is among the old Vatican MSS. and the hymns collected by G. Cassander. It is scarcely possible that it comes down as late as the eleventh century.

Robert’s other sequences are six in number and of no importance. His personal history is pathetic enough. He was the son of Hugh Capet; born at Orleans in 970 and died at Melun, July 20th, 1031, having been sole king since 996, though he had been crowned in 988. His first wife was Susanne, an Italian princess; and we learn from his contemporary, Richer of Rheims, that one of his first public acts was to repudiate her on the plea that she was too old for him, and that he refused to restore her dowry. His next marriage was with his distant cousin Bertha—a cousin four times removed—the widow of the Count of Blois. This marriage was inconvenient to the Emperor Otho, as it would have brought the House of Capet into the line of succession to certain lordships in the old Kingdom of Burgundy. So Pope Gregory V., the kinsman of Otho, required Robert to give up Bertha, not because Susanne was still alive, but because the Church forbade the marriage of cousins in even the fourth degree. At first Robert refused, but when his kingdom was laid under an interdict, he showed as little manhood in standing by his second wife as he had shown humanity and justice to his first. Such a ban was too severe to be borne and the king yielded, though Baronius says he tried to take back his wife Bertha in spite of it all. His life and kingship belong to French history, and can be found there. His disposition was that of a monk and not of a monarch. He founded four monasteries and built seven churches. He supported three hundred paupers entirely and a thousand in part. His reign lasted—thanks to ecclesiastical influence—for thirty-four years. It was troubled and not especially pleasant; and for his third wife the king had married the handsome shrew Constance, the daughter of William Count of Arles. Pious and excellent man that he is reputed to have been, he had a natural son, Amauri, who was great-great-grandfather to Simon de Montfort. Truly, when all is said and done, Robert II. is hardly the author in whom we would like to believe with all our hearts when we sing—

“Holy Spirit, come and shine

Sweetly in this heart of mine.”

Per contra, Hermann of Reichenau grows more interesting the more he is studied. He has been so unfortunate as to be confused with other persons in two or three cases. By Brander he is identified with Hartmann of St. Gall, and the sequence Rex omnipotens is taken from him.[8] The pretty little sequence, Veni Sancte Spiritus et reple, which Königsfeld thinks to be his, is doubtless no earlier than the fourteenth century and by some anonymous composer who has merely imitated the great masters.

Beside the Rex omnipotens he composed the Ave praeclara maris stella, where his name gains another misprint and becomes “Heinricus, monachus San Gallensis.” This poem was thought worthy of the authorship of Albertus Magnus (Albert von Regensburg), and to him accordingly Wackernagel and Koch credit it. Mone has vindicated the claim of Hermann which is set forth in Migne. (Patrologia, 143; 20 ff.) So that we are again sure of a piece which has been meritorious enough to be coveted.

Then comes the antiphon Simon Barjona, which Du Meril calls Simon Baronia and of which no trace remains. Two other sequences are, however, extant, and are beyond any question or debate. They are the Salve regina, which Daniel calls a “most celebrated antiphon,” and the Alma redemptoris mater, the refrain of which Chaucer used in that “Prioress’s Tale,” which Wordsworth has modernized.

In addition we must observe that the Veni Sancte is attributed to Hermann simultaneously and by the same authority as that which credits him with the other sequences. Two pieces—Vox haec melos pangat and Gratus honos hierarchia—are lost. But the Salve regina was worth contending for; and Gerbert names Gregory II., Peter of Compostella, St. Bernard, and “Adhemar, Episcopus Podiensis” (Bishop of Puy and his own candidate) together with Hermannus Contractus. Nevertheless, Trithemius, Gerbert, and, indeed, everybody are heard to declare that Hermann was “the marvel of the age,” the best man of his time in music and the author of a work on metrical rules. He is known as Doctor Egregius, and it is beyond any peradventure that he was capable of writing the Veni Sancte.

The only arguments that are employed to prove that Robert was the author are very weak. The first is that there was no sufficient competitor. But surely Hermannus Contractus is now a competitor of real merit and importance. Then, too, the king was a kind of religious pet, and such persons receive more than their due. But the second argument is weaker still. It amounts in brief to the harmony displayed in the poem between the king’s life and his lovely verses. It strikes one, however, that an invalid like Hermann might have had fully as deep a religious experience as any such king. Moreover—and this is a vital fact—the Veni Sancte is found in the German hymnaries almost exclusively. This point was insisted upon in the controversy about the Veni, Creator; and Charles the Great in this respect had the advantage over Gregory the Great, until the claim of Rabanus Maurus, another German, was thoroughly examined. But among all the sources carefully edited by Kehrein from Daniel, Mone, and elsewhere, the French collections do not present themselves. On the contrary, in this elaborate list we find St. Gall, Kreuzlingen, Freiburg, Karlsruhe, Mainz, Ebersberg, Rome (1481), Venice (1497), with later examples printed at Cologne, Prague, Eichstettin, Lubeck, and Basel. Brander also found the hymn in the earliest codices of the three great neighboring cloisters of St. Gall, Einsiedeln, and Reichenau. Meanwhile the only notice of it in France comes from the Paris Breviary, which is of recent date.

There is but one consideration further. I trust that I have established the perfect possibility that Hermannus Contractus might have been the author equally as well as Robert. The men lived in the same period to which, on the testimony of the best critics, the hymn is considered to belong. They were alike in possibilities of Christian experience and of musical and poetical temperament. But here they begin to diverge; and the preference is decidedly in favor of Hermann, whose hymn is found in the three oldest codices of his own neighborhood; of St. Gall, where he studied; of Einsiedeln, where it is possible that he was a resident; and of Reichenau, where he certainly lived from the age of thirty until his death. He could scarcely have gone about very much in his helpless and crippled condition; and these three conventual establishments are within a moderate distance of each other. From his seventh year he was to be discovered always somewhere in that vicinity, and the historians of St. Gall and of Reichenau positively claim the Veni Sancte as his.

It is only left for us to lay the Salve regina side by side with the Veni Sancte. A man who wrote upon metre ought to possess some excellence in the art of which he wrote, and these pieces placed together display a graceful and ingenious versification which is not at all usual in that century. It is not claimed that either Robert or Hermann wrote other hymns in the identical stanza form of the Veni Sancte. Therefore nothing is available for direct comparison. But as to the spirit of each there can be no debate. Robert never composed anything else like the Veni Sancte, and it certainly seems as if Hermann did compose a sequence which bears a passing resemblance; and which I have endeavored to translate with its occasional rhymes and assonances:

Salve regina, mater misericordiae

Vita, dulcedo et spes nostra, salve.

Ad te clamamus exules filii Hevae.

Ad te suspiramus gementes et flentes in hac lacrimarum valle.

Eia ergo advocata nostra, illos tuos misericordes oculos ad nos converte

Et Jesum benedictum fructum ventris tui nobis post hoc exilium ostende,

O clemens, O pia, O dulcis virgo Maria.

Hail O queen, mother of pitifulness!

Life and delight and our confidence, hail!

To thee we exiles, children of Eve, are crying.

To thee we aspire, groaning and moaning in this the vale of our sorrow.

Lo, thou therefore, our advocate, turn upon us those pitiful eyes of thine,

And after this exile show us Jesus, the blessed fruit of thy womb,

O merciful, O pious, O sweet Virgin Maria.

This is another of his sequences, the Rex regum Dei agne, found by Brander among the antiquities of St. Gall:

King of kings, Lamb of God, mighty Lion of Judah,

The death of sin by the merit of the cross and the life of justice; giving the fruit of the tree of life for the taste of wisdom; the medicine of grace for the loss of glory,

Since thy blood restrained the might of the sword of flame, opening the garden of paradise, the seed of obedience, the medicine of grace.

This day is illustrious to the Lord; peace is on the earth, lightning to the shades below and light to the saints above; the day of the double baptism of law and gospel.

Christ is the passover to man; while the old passes the new arises; rejoice my heart, freed from ferment, full of the bread unleavened.

Since the enemy are overwhelmed, with stained door-posts eat the sacrifice on the paschal night, at home, with the bitter herb of the field,

Let your loins be girt and your shoes bound on, have the staff in the hand, and eat the head with the legs and the purtenance thereof.

Wash us this day, O Christ, cleansing us with hyssop; and make us worthy of this mystery, drying the sea, boring the jaw of Leviathan with a mighty hook.

Rejoice us with the cup and fill us; arouse us, drinking from the brook in the way, thou our propitiation, thou priest and sacrifice, thou wine-press and stone of offence and grape!

O fragrant flower of the virgin rod,

O light full of sevenfold dew,

Fairer in beauty than the juice of the grape,

The blush of the rose, the candor of the lily.

How camest thou with such pity to bend to the help of this little world; that thou mightest share our sorrows and be our Redeemer from the birthmark of sin, bearing the curse of sin?

O Lord, Kinsman of thy servants,

The hope of the first and of the last resurrection,

Confirm thy covenant to the seed of Abraham, and us, O Leader immortal, reviving with thyself, who are dead with thee to our old father Adam, strengthen, joining us to thy mightier members.

Give us the paschal feast of the life eternal, thou Paschal Lamb!

The question before us is not one of theology but of literature. Did the man who wrote those verses write these also?

Veni, Sancte Spiritus,

Et emitte coelitus

Lucis tuae radium.

Veni, pater pauperum,

Veni, dator munerum,

Veni, lumen cordium;

Consolator optime,

Dulcis hospes animae,

Dulce refrigerium:

In labore requies,

In aestu temperies,

In fletu solatium.

O lux beatissima,

Reple cordis intima

Tuorum fidelium!

Sine tuo numine

Nihil est in homine,

Nihil est innoxium.

Lava quod est sordidum,

Riga quod est aridum,

Sana quod est saucium;

Flecte quod est rigidum,

Fove quod est frigidum,

Rege quod est devium!

Da tuis fidelibus

In te confidentibus

Sacrum septenarium;

Da virtutis meritum,

Da salutis exitum,

Da perenne gaudium!

---

Come Holy Spirit,

And send forth the heavenly

Ray of thy light.

Come, Father of the poor;

Come, giver of gifts;

Come, light of hearts.

Thou best consoler,

Sweet guest of the soul,

Sweet coolness;

In labor, rest;

In heat, refreshment;

In tears, solace.

O blessedest light,

Fill the inmost parts

Of the heart of thy faithful!

Without thy divinity

Nothing is in man,

Nothing is harmless.

Wash what is base;

Bedew what is dry;

Heal what is hurt;

Bend what is harsh;

Warm what is chilled;

Rule what is astray.

Give to thy faithful,

In thee confiding,

Thy sevenfold gift.

Give the reward of virtue;

Give the death of safety;

Give eternal joy.

This very singular construction of clauses is apparent to the eye at once. Let it be remembered that Robert uses it nowhere else, and that the most of Hermann’s writings are gone. This chance for the “higher criticism” is therefore taken from us. If it could be shown, however, that this was a method employed by the monk of Reichenau in his prose works, the case might be regarded as absolutely proven, in so far as it demonstrates that the bulk of the presumptive evidence is in his favor.

But here we are at fault. We can only add probability to probability and leave all absolute demonstration alone. Pez has preserved not merely Egon’s account of Hermann’s life, but he has edited Hermann’s treatises on the astrolabe (Thes. Anecdot. Tom., III., pt. 2, p. 94) from a MS. codex in the monastery of St. Peter at Salzburg. His musical treatise is reprinted by Gerbert. (Scriptores Eccl. de Musica, vol. ii., p. 124.) The didactic poem reciting the combat of the Sheep and the Flax—always recognized as the production of Hermann—is in Migne’s Patrologia and also in Du Meril’s Poesies Populaires. Unfortunately none of these writings are of a sort to help us. We cannot by their assistance make any headway in critical analysis.

It is noticeable that J. A. Fabricius in his great work on the Middle Age and later Latin writers, allows Hermann to be the author of the Veni Sancte, following the testimony of Egon and Metzler. And it is more than noticeable that Du Meril—himself a Frenchman—should also apparently concede the hymn to this German.[9]

I have made an exhaustive search for everything bearing upon the life and writings of Hermannus Contractus. I have pursued him and Robert through the Quellen of German history; through the writings and compilations of Canisius and Despont and Urstitius and Martene and Mabillon and D’Achery and Pertz and the Monumenta Germaniae Historica of the “Society for Opening the Sources of German History.” In these and in the encyclopaedias of La Rousse and Ersch-Gruber and the great Patrologia of Migne, I have investigated every by-path and blind alley. It is abundantly clear that he was the most distinguished man of his region, and, likely, of his period. Usserman and Possevin have devoted attention to him. (Prodromus Germ. Sacr. Tom. I., p. 145 sqq., De Apparatu.) His didactic poem on the “Eight Principal Vices” is in Haupt’s Zeitschrift, vol. xiii. His lives of Conrad and of Henry III. have not been preserved. That he was a very voluminous writer is also evident. After giving the names of some of his sequences Metzler adds that there were cetera mille alia—a thousand more. So also speaks Trithemius; and indeed this testimony is universal.

A single line of inquiry has been left to the American student. We have lists of the MSS. in the various libraries of Europe. If it were only possible to examine these with reference to the Veni Sancte the matter could be definitely settled. The Rheinau (Reichenau) library is rich in hymnaries. Haenel’s “No. 53”—whose library number is 91—is, for instance, a Liber hymnorum of the tenth to the twelfth centuries. There are several others—breviaries and collections of hymns—dating to the twelfth century; and one book, “No. 124” (Lib. No. 75), which is marked Sequentiae propriae, etc., and which is likely to have the Veni Sancte. In the eleventh century at St. Gall they have “No. 381” (St. Gall No. 486) which is a codex insignis—a very beautiful MS.—containing the “earliest collection of hymns and poems of writers dwelling at St. Gall.” In this same century appears the Anselm, which is noted as a codex nobiliter scriptus ab Herimanno, qui se hoc libri decus ex voto perfecisse testatur (pag. 6), a manuscript elegantly written by Hermann [“Herimann” is his own spelling of his name in the Chronicon, by the way], who says on page 6 that he has accomplished this excellent volume in pursuance of a vow. Among these St. Gall MSS. can be found the Salve regina, bearing the date 1437. If it were made a point of investigation it might be discovered that in both Reichenau and St. Gall the Veni, Sancte Spiritus is in codices which utterly remove it from the perplexity of its authorship, and positively join it to the name of Hermann.

One can sum up the whole discussion in a few sentences. Robert wrote no other valuable hymns; Hermann did write several. Robert was not specially skilled in metrical science; Hermann was the author of a treatise on the subject. Robert was a poet and a musician; Hermann was his superior in both departments. Robert had trouble and sorrow and Christian experience; Hermann must certainly have had as much as he, and more. Robert has had poems attributed to him which have failed of proof, and none of his own verses seem ever to have been misappropriated or missing; Hermann has had more taken from him than given to him.

In the matter of authority we are to note:

1. That the historians of St. Gall and of Reichenau claim for Hermann the Veni Sancte.

2. That the hymn is found in the earliest codices of both places; and of Einsiedeln, which is in the neighborhood.

3. That Clichtove is in doubt and Daniel is in doubt; that J. A. Fabricius and Du Meril incline toward Egon’s statement; that Trithemius is not entirely unprejudiced; and that Migne, gathering nearly everything (as I have verified from the originals), leaves a strong presumption in Hermann’s favor.

I may appear to make a good deal too much of this matter of mediaeval jealousy. But no student of those times needs to be told that the jealousy between the various cloisters was excessive. There is a letter of the Reichenau monk Gunzo, written in 960. (Martene, I., 296.) It is addressed to the “holy congregation at Reichenau” and describes his journey to St. Gall. The distance was great enough to exhaust the learned brother; he was lifted off of his beast and carried in by hospitable hands. Notwithstanding which he vents his indignation upon their methods and their lack of scholarship. They are self indulgent; they are a fraud on the face of the earth. Nihil inde sed fraudis molamina parabantur—they do nothing there except contrive a great mass of deception, says the angry Gunzo. They attacked him on his grammar; and he attacked them in turn on their loquacity. The epistle is grimly humorous at this distance of time; but the bitterness was altogether too genuine to be pleasant.

Far away from the most of these noises—separated by the waters of the lake from the trampling pilgrim-bands who went to and fro between the East and West—Hermann of Reichenau passed his quiet hours. His convent was rich. Its abbot was said to be able to journey to Rome and not sleep anywhere on the way except upon his own soil. It had been founded in 724 under the auspices of Charles Martel. Such was the admirable situation of this religious house—sufficient to itself in the midst of all changes.

They buried Hermann in his ancestral tomb at Altshausen. In 1631 “three bones” of him were exhumed and carried “by force” to the monastery of Ochsenhausen, but who took them and who resisted the taking of them, we are not told. These are the meagre particulars of a life gentle, patient, and unassuming—the life of a scholar and of a poet—who mastered great obstacles by the genius of faith.

Three hundred years before Christ there came into Ceylon the Buddhist missionary Mahinda. The king received him kindly and built for him and his monks a convent on the hill Mihintale, to the east of the royal city. On the western face of this hill Mahinda had his own retreat cut out from the living rock. Still can be seen—though after two thousand years—this study in which the great teacher of Ceylon “sat and thought and worked through the long years of his peaceful and useful life.” Under the cool shadow of his rock, with his stone couch on which to repose, and with the busy plain, so far removed from him, sending its faint noises up from below, there wrought the sage. And there he died at last and was buried in the neighboring Dagāba. Modern times have nearly forgotten him, but no story of that valley or that island is complete without his name.

And so, in this later manner, lived and died Hermann Count of Vöhringen, who laid down earthly honors to take up the pursuit of heavenly glory; who overcame peevishness of mind and weakness of body by faith and hope and love; who looked out upon his times from this serene distance, and who went to his last sleep beneath the shadow of the rock.

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Note.—I am not ignorant that Jourdain (Recherches critiques sur l’Age et l’Origine des Traductions latines d’Aristote. Paris, 1819 and 1843) has attacked the ascription of translations of Aristotle from the Arabic to our Hermann, denying that the cripple of Reichenau possessed any knowledge of that tongue. Briefly stated his arguments are these: 1. That Trithemius followed Jacobus of Bergamo in ascribing to H. Contractus a knowledge of Arabic. 2. That Metzler (whom he calls Mezler) has added the statement about the Poetics and Rhetoric. 3. That every one else has followed these two authorities. 4. That “H. Alemannus” wrote in Toledo, to which the other Hermann could not have journeyed. 5. That the translations were by this “H. Alemannus” (Hermann the German) who flourished in the first half of the thirteenth century.

It is enough of a reply to say: 1. That the concluding words of a manuscript relate, not to its author, but to its transcriber. The MS. mentioned by Jourdain and the other MS. in the Bibliotheque Royale of the fifteenth century (viz., Doctrina Matumeti, quae apud Saracenos magnae auctoritatis est, ab Hermanno latine translata. Cod. MS., No. 6225) are both later than their original date. This second MS. may be by Hermann de Schildis, a monk of the thirteenth century. 2. Every one has not “followed” the authority of Metzler and Trithemius. The “Anonymus Mellicensis” (twelfth century) enumerates treatises by Hermannus Contractus upon Computation, Astronomy, Physiognomy and Poetry, which at least imply that Aristotle had largely affected his studies. 3. It is notable also to find H. Alemannus quoting Cicero in his two introductions, when we know H. Contractus to have been very fond of Cicero. 4. H. Alemannus says that he has met great “impediments” and “difficulties” in accomplishing this translation, and that the difference between Latin and Arabic poetry forbade a poetical rendering. Which would coincide with H. Contractus’s personal obstacles and with his natural desire as a poet to attempt a rendering in verse. 5. H. Alemannus refers to “Johannes Burgensis” (John of Burgau, in Suabia) as a bishop and the king’s chancellor and his personal friend and the promoter of this work. I cannot find “John of Burgau;” but H. Contractus was a Suabian, and Suabia is very near to Reichenau. H. Contractus was also closely associated with Conrad and Henry III., whose lives he wrote.

It is a curious question this. It is only another proof of the neglect into which a great man has fallen. For Hermann is called “nostri miraculum seculi” by the next generation who came after him. And there is no absolute proof that, “without lexicon or grammar” (for so Jourdain puts it), he could not have mastered Arabic. Observing the topics of his other writings cognate to those of Aristotle, I am therefore not in the least inclined to yield to even M. Charles Jourdain.

CHAPTER XVI.
PETER DAMIANI, CARDINAL AND FLAGELLANT.

It is not every poet who begins by keeping the swine and ends by wearing the red hat and purple robe of a cardinal-bishop. Nor is it every poet who commences as a forlorn and deserted foundling, to whom it is a great mercy to have even swine to keep by way of getting his daily bread. But all this and more befell Damiani.

We are not informed about his parentage, except that he had a mother who abandoned him, and a brother (or, more probably, an uncle) who took pity on him. He was born in Ravenna. Some authorities say it was in 988; others that it was in 1007. A modern hymnologist, anxious to be right (though he is frequently wrong), sets it at 1002. But 1007 has the greatest weight of evidence.

This brother, or uncle, had compassion on the lad, and poor little outcast Peter was sent by him “into his fields to feed swine,” a much more honorable employment of course in Italy than in Palestine, and one which he shared with Nicholas Brakespeare, the English pope, Hadrian IV. What was his previous history we cannot discover, though the Acta Sanctorum for February 23d is full of legendary accounts. We only know that his natural abilities attracted the notice of another relative (brother, some say), who was an archdeacon at Ravenna. He it was who advanced Peter to the opportunities of education, and who proved so fast a friend that the boy took his patron’s name for his own. As Eusebius called himself Eusebius Pamphili (Pamphilus’s Eusebius), so Peter became Peter Damiani, “Damian’s Peter,” and this designation has adhered to him ever since. It is amusing to read now and then of Peter Damianus, as if Damiani were an Italian nominative case instead of a Latin genitive.

His birth was too obscure to lead any person to interfere with him. He therefore quietly studied and improved, to the edification of his fellow-pupils and the admiration of his teachers. His school-training was, first of all, in Faenza. Thence he was sent to Parma, and eventually he returned to Ravenna, where he taught with distinction and popular approval, until he was nearly or quite thirty years old.

The age was barbarous and good professors were scarce. It seems to have been expected that brilliant minds would go on shining like those exhaustless lamps which are fabled to have been found in the tombs of the old magicians. If such was the case, with the intense intellect of Damiani he must have tapped some source of real spiritual power early in his course, for he burns brightly even now as we read his vivid truthfulness and peruse some of his lovely verses, out from which leap, nevertheless, tongues of flaming scorn for hypocrites and simonists.

Yes, the age was barbarous, and therefore Peter Damiani was soon a professor, with many students and an abundance of fees. Knowledge in those days not only meant power but wealth, and he was fast growing rich in Ravenna. It was a delightful life, but it did not suit him. He was, in fact, the “spiritual kinsman, and in many respects the pioneer” of Gregory VII. Hildebrand came to be, after awhile, his personal friend, his sanctus Sathanas, his Mephistopheles, his instigator and stimulant. Of a sudden, then, he departed from Ravenna to take up his abode with the hermits of Fonte Avellana, near Gubbio. Here he was known by the name of Frater Honestus, and surely he deserved the title, for he was a swift witness against every sort of sin. Guy, the abbot, persuaded him to undertake the instruction of the brethren, and thus he found himself back at his old work of teaching once more.

It was not long before the new monk became prior of the convent. Then, in 1041, he rose to be abbot. And then, in 1047, he indited to Pope Leo IX. his famous Liber Gomorrhianus. This Gomorrah Book is just what its name implies. It is one of the earliest protests uttered within the Church against the awful wickedness which was everywhere prevalent.

The subject is far too unpleasant for me to deal with it at any length. And yet this disagreeable topic forces itself upon the notice of the student of that period wherever he may turn. Most ingenious and sophistical distinctions were made in those days relative to sin. This thing, for instance, was wrong; but that other was not half so wrong as this was. Such an offence was to be condoned by a trifling penance, and such another was to be only met by years of contrition. Against all this hypocritical nastiness Damiani set his pen. No more scathing book was ever written. And the only wonder is that it has evaded the vigilance of the men who suffered by it, and has made its escape into type, never again to be in peril of its existence. Bayle—who may be safely accounted unapproachable in such abstruse inquiries—has given us the whole story of this book. It was a terrible scourge to the vices of the clergy, and even Baronius allows that it was not written one moment too soon.

The pope to whom this remarkable document was addressed was a man of appropriate spirit. He was the third in the series of five able German popes, who labored so hard in the cause of disciplinary reform. At Hildebrand’s advice, he had laid aside the papal insignia, which he donned at his election, and came to Rome as a barefooted pilgrim in 1048. He aimed to put down simony, to stop the barter and sale of benefices, and to secure the celibacy of the clergy. To this end he used the synods with vigor, and was ready for almost any proposed reform which fell in with his line of operations. He was of the German, not the ultramontane party, and therefore was quite liberal in his construction of the great text, “Thou art Peter,” and went so far as to say that the Church should first of all be built upon the true rock, which was Christ. To him, then, the Gomorrah Book went, and it made a stir.

The next four popes occupied among them no longer period of ecclesiastical rule than from the year 1054 to the year 1061. Matters were unsettled. No one continued in office. But the finger of Hildebrand the cardinal was mightier than the hand of any pope. Nicholas II. was guided by him, and Alexander II., who came forward in 1061, was unquestionably under his control. And when Alexander appeared, it seemed that the Gomorrah Book was still an element of unrest and disturbance, at a time when the claims of an Antipope (Honorius II.) had been set up by the Imperialist party, and it was necessary for even Hildebrand’s friends to give as little offence as possible to the clergy. For the election of Alexander was clearly irregular, because it was in defiance of the rules laid down by Nicholas II. at a Lateran Synod in 1059. With a genial and suave manner the new pontiff now borrowed the work for the ostensible purpose of having it copied by the help of the Abbot of St. Saviour. That was the last that Damiani saw of it for some little while.

If Alexander thought that the hermit abbot of Fonte Avellana would submit to this method of suppression he flattered his soul in vain. Damiani, after a reasonable delay, appealed to his friend Hildebrand. The book was like a part of himself, and he had no desire to have it treated with neglect. One cannot here follow the windings of the story further than to say that Damiani got his book again, and now we have it too.

I am surprised at the blindness which prevents some writers from seeing in this Peter de Honestis a most noble and consistent character. Morheim only pays him a merited compliment when he says that his “genius, candor, integrity, and writings of various kinds, entitle him to rank among the first men of the age, although he was not free from the faults of the times.” But how could one easily avoid the extreme of severity who was confronted by the grossest sins that ever carried a hissing sibilant in front of their names! Flagellation was a natural reaction from those fleshly lusts that warred against the soul.

Somehow Hildebrand took a great fancy to this genuine reformer. His own great schemes were ripening, and Damiani was just the man to be made of value in the office of cardinal. In 1057, then, the abbot had been created cardinal-bishop of Ostia by Pope Nicholas II., and in the year following deacon of the holy college. At first he strenuously resisted the honor, but was forced to assume it by the Pope’s command. In 1059 he had acted as papal legate to the semi-independent Ambrosian Church of Milan. Here he obtained pledges from them that they would conduct their affairs with purity and agree to receive the authority of the Roman pontiff.

He did not remain among the cardinals very long. His convent allured him, and the display requisite to his proper duties was both irksome and repugnant to him. Therefore he went home again, ardently devoted to Hildebrand, but devoid of all ambition, and ready to denounce the Pope or anybody else when it appeared that the rights of the Church were infringed.

In 1062 Alexander II. found use for him as legate to France, and he influenced Cluny in favor of Alexander II. In 1068-69 we find him again a legate in Germany, impressing on young Henry IV. the importance of submission to Rome. This, too, he effected; and in 1072—the last year of his life—he appears in the same capacity at the age of sixty six, busy with the reform of the Church in his native Ravenna.

This is the outline of his story, and it bears no great marks of difference from others which have been commemorated in ecclesiastical history. Upon these services, and upon his relations to Hildebrand, a claim to considerable repute might be established for him. These facts, however, would not keep him in mind to-day so well as his doctrine of flagellation and the melody of his two grand hymns.

This matter of flagellation was older than Damiani’s time. It was permitted in the convents to give five “disciplinary strokes.” Starting at this point Peter the Honest asks, “Why may we not give the sixth, for the same reason?” If these five have been inflicted on the unwilling victim, why should he not secure some credit to himself by taking a sixth, a seventh, an eighth? The ice once broken, it is easy to see how the new custom would be seized upon by the ascetic hermits of Fonte Avellana. The argument is curious, as a specimen of that specious reasoning to which the ecclesiastic mind was tending, and which, later on, comes into full bloom among the Jesuit fathers.

Damiani inquires “if our Saviour was not beaten; if Paul did not receive, on several occasions, forty stripes save one; if all the apostles were not scourged; and whether the martyrs had not received the same punishment. Did not St. Jerome say that these were scourged by order of God? And who dares deny that they were scourged for others and not for themselves? Hence, if one undertakes this discipline, willingly, for himself, he must be doing a good thing.” (See Fleury: Hist. Ecclesiastique, XII., p. 107, Anno 1062.) He then adds the example of Guy, his predecessor, who died 1046, and of Poppo, a contemporary, who had died in 1048. The date of his own advocacy of this doctrine is about 1056.

Monte Cassino took up the practice with vigor; but in Peter’s own convent the most consummate example of flagellation was speedily developed, and his disciple, Dominic of the Cuirass (Dominicus Loricatus), carries off the palm from all posterity. The method proposed by Damiani was that the psalter should be recited to the accompaniment of the blows of the scourge. Every psalm called for one hundred strokes; the whole psalter for fifteen thousand. By this spiritual arithmetic three thousand equalled one year of purgatory, and therefore the complete psalter answered for five years of purgation removed from either one’s self or one’s neighbor. But Dominic was an inebriate in his flogging and set himself tasks of stupendous size. He also improved the art in several respects. He used both hands with dreadful facility, and frequently lashed his face until it was covered with blood, singing his psalms the while in a harsh, cracked, and terrible voice. In the forty days of one Lent he recited the psalter two hundred times, and inflicted what one reckless calculator calls “sixty million stripes” upon himself. The true number is three million, which is clearly sufficient.

At another occasion he literally flogged himself “against time,” apparently just to see what could be done by a determined man in twenty-four hours. At the end of that period he had gone through the psalter twelve times and a fraction over, and had given himself one hundred and eighty-three thousand stripes, working away with both hands (as a caustic writer suggests) “in the interest of the great sinking fund of the Catholic Church.”

Flagellation, like the dancing mania and the strange parades of the Turlepins and Anabaptists in the Middle Ages, has its root in nervous excitement and morbid devotion. Under Anthony of Padua, about 1210, all Perugia lashed themselves through the streets. Justin of Padua relates that great disorders and indecency attended the processions. The madness spread like wildfire through Rome and Italy. In 1260 and in 1261 the custom was again revived after some decadence, in the same town of Perugia and under one Rainer. And at this date thousands went out into Germany led by priests with banners and crosses. Again fading from public notice, the flagellants reappeared during the progress of the plague in 1349. Hecker and Cooper supplement the account given by Boileau. The affair was itself an epidemic. The company marched and sang hymns—among which was the Stabat Mater—and bore tapers and magnificent banners. They finally became a regular nomadic tribe, separating into two portions, one of which went to the south and the other to the north. The Church was powerless, and those pro and anti flagellationists, who happened to be in ecclesiastical authority, solemnly excommunicated each other!

The wild license of these scenes was far from aiding either morality or religion. Clement VI. (1332-52) issued his bull against them. And, inasmuch as these fanatics had failed to restore a dead child to life in Strasburg, the malediction of Rome had some effect, and once more the harsh custom died out.

Then there was another upheaval under Venturinus, a Dominican of Bergamo, and ten thousand persons joined the order. Like a perennial plant it again perished and again sprang up in 1414, when these awful orgies were renewed under the leadership of a person named Conrad. But now the Inquisition interfered, and among the testimony taken to show the lengths to which the fanaticism went is the sworn evidence of a citizen of Nordhausen who, in 1446, asserted that his wife wanted to have the children scourged just as soon as they had been baptized!

Once more, in the sixteenth century the Black and Gray Penitents appeared in France. In 1574 the Queen-mother put herself at the head of the black band in Avignon, and the disorders, indecency, and general depravity of manners which followed would scarcely be believed even if it was proper to mention them.

From that date to the present time more or less of this old insanity occasionally reappears. It affords a singular commentary on our boasted advance beyond those dark ages, for us to know that the Penitentes of our own Californian coast do precisely every year what Dominic of the Cuirass and Anthony of Padua and Conrad and Rainer all did centuries ago.

And this frightful enginery of fanaticism was set in motion by the man who wrote one of the loveliest hymns in the Latin language!

I make no attempt to analyze the feelings that have prompted this strange austerity. Isaac Taylor has already done this in a most masterly fashion in his Fanaticism. But the essence of it is that wild delusion which leads men (and even women) to fancy that they can vicariously atone for others’ sins and “make merit,” as the heathen do, for those who are less bold than themselves. They have fastened themselves down like the poor wretched geese doomed to furnish pattes-de-fois-gras. They are before the hot fire of zeal and gorged upon indigestible dogmas. Hence their charity becomes as abnormal as the livers of the geese, and the moral epicure, alas, finds in them dainties suitable for his depraved taste!

It would be a grievous injustice to a good man if Damiani should only bear with us the character of an ardent zealot and not of a Christian poet. In this last guise he is at his best. Doubtless he often offends by his Mariolatry, but he will as often charm by the music of his verse. He may serve also as a convenient example of this worship of Mary, for in one of his prayers he has given us the pith and core of that peculiar devotion. It runs thus:

“O queen of the world, stairs of heaven, throne of God, gate of paradise, hear the prayers of the poor and despise not the groans of the wretched. By thee our vows and sighs are borne to the presence of the Redeemer, that whatsoever things are forbidden to our merits may obtain, through thee, place in the ears of divine piety. Erase sins, relieve crimes, raise the fallen, and release the entangled. Through thee the thorns and shoots of vice are cut down, and the flowers and ornaments of virtue appear. Appease with prayers the Judge, the Saviour, whom thou didst produce in unique childbirth, that He who through thee has become partaker of our humanity, through thee may also make us partakers of His divinity. Who with God the Father and the Holy Spirit liveth and reigneth, world without end. Amen.”

I have given this as an example of his prose. Here is a petition “against a stormy time,” composed in that “leonine and tailed rhyme” in which Bernard of Cluny, a century later, wrote the De Contemptu mundi. It commences,

“O miseratrix, O dominatrix, praecipe dictu!

O thou that pitiest, O thou the mightiest, hark to our crying;

Lest we be beaten down, lest we be smitten down when hail is flying.

Thine is a priestly breast, O thou that succorest, mother eternal

Therefore we pray to thee, lest we be stayed from thee, by storm infernal.

Quiet the tempest-wrack! Give us the sunshine back for our fair weather!

Lend us clear light again, make the stars bright again where the clouds feather!

Virgin, oh cherish thy friends lest we perish by sickness or anger;

Drive all these ills away, thou whose love stills away thunder’s mad clangor!”

By far the greater part of his hymns are addressed to the Virgin and to the saints, but there are some others—the Paule doctor Egregie, the Paschalis festi gaudium, the Christe sanctorum gloria, and the two powerful judgment hymns, Gravi me terrore and O Quam dira, quam horrenda—which are worthy of note. This Gravi me terrore of the eleventh century ranks with the Apparebit repentina of the seventh century. These, together with the Dies Irae of the fourteenth century, form the great judgment triad of Latin psalmody.

Yet of all the hymns of that or any later time, nothing approaches the beauty of the Ad perennis vitae fontem, of which this Peter Damiani sings. It is born of Augustine’s thoughts and dreams of the heavenly land, and some of its phrases are exquisite beyond the possibility of translation. When Frater Honestus on February 23d, 1072, forever left that convent of Fonte Avellana, whither Dante went upon his last recorded journey, then that noble landscape might preserve these sixty-one lines of Latin verse among the choicest treasures of its dell and grove. This was no lark that sang against the sun with clarion notes calling us to such praise as rings through the ancient morning hymn of Hilary. It was the nightingale of Faenza, sending out those thrilling tones from the midst of the walls which beheld the eager scholar and to which the weary cardinal had returned to die. Upon his fame it is set therefore not like the lark’s song, but the nightingale’s, not as the flashing diamond, but (in Daniel’s very words) “as a precious pearl for our treasury.” Mrs. Charles has rendered it into English with grace and success. Mr. Morgan appends this autograph note to the version in the copy of his book which is in my possession: “N. B.—This hymn was printed without revision. If reprinted the metres will be made equal.” He has not attempted to follow the versification of the original. I know of no other translation except that of R. F. Littledale in Lyra Mystica.

Another beautiful hymn which was suggested by the prose of Augustine, and is ascribed to Peter Damiani by Anselm of Canterbury, who was his younger contemporary, is the Quid tyranne, quid minaris. It is commonly called