See fulfilled the prophets’ warning,
Heaven and earth in ashes burning!
Oh, what fear man’s bosom rendeth,
When from heaven the Judge descendeth,
On whose sentence all dependeth.”
Sir Walter Scott’s version is in four-line stanzas, three of which are used to make a practicable hymn. But who in our self-complacent age cares to sing any of these versions, portraying “The Last Judgment”?
Another famous hymn, written by a follower of Francis of Assisi, perhaps Jacopone da Todi, “the fool for Christ’s sake,” is the “Stabat Mater Dolorosa.” It celebrates the sufferings, not of Christ on the cross, but of Mary, his mother, standing at its foot. It is the supreme Mariolatrous hymn in sentiment and in diction. It is Roman, of course, not Catholic, and interests us only as marking the sincerity and the depth of the medieval sentiment and devotion to the Madonna.
This great hymn is noteworthy because of the many translations into modern languages which have been made, seventy-eight into German alone and as many more into English, in whole or in part. Its emotional possibilities have appealed to many music composers, including Palestrina, Pergolesi, Haydn, Rossini, and Dvorak—settings varied in style from Palestrina’s high dignity to Rossini’s almost theatrical treatment.
It must be remembered that the Greek hymns of the Eastern church, and the Latin hymns of the Western, were not in dead languages, as they appear to us, but in living languages, the vernacular of the persons producing and using them. While the common people may have spoken a different dialect, the monks and clergy used the classic speech as a very mother tongue. The hymns were for the most part a perfectly spontaneous expression of religious conviction and feeling, a living product of vital experience, an instinctive expression of profound faith.
In closing this rapid survey of a thousand years of Greek and Latin hymns, one is impressed that they are all clerical—even monastic—in type and character. There are in many of them spontaneity, genuine feeling, and personal experience, a profound sense of spiritual realities; yet over all of them falls the shadow of the tonsured ecclesiastic, with his heart set on the impressiveness of the forms of worship rather than on the ultimate result in creating spiritual reactions in the individuals of the congregation.