Hymns.
And if the beneficial effect in the literary sense of these light songs is not to be overlooked, how much greater in every way is that of the magnificent compositions of which they were in some cases the parody! It will be more convenient to postpone to a [later chapter] of this volume a consideration of the exact way in which Latin sacred poetry affected the prosody of the vernacular; but it is well here to point out that almost all the finest and most famous examples of the mediæval hymn, with perhaps the sole exception of Veni, Sancte Spiritus, date from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.[8] Ours are the stately rhythms of Adam of St Victor, and the softer ones of St Bernard the Greater. It was at this time that Jacopone da Todi, in the intervals of his eccentric vernacular exercises, was inspired to write the Stabat Mater. From this time comes that glorious descant of Bernard of Morlaix, in which, the more its famous and very elegant English paraphrase is read beside it, the more does the greatness and the beauty of the original appear. And from this time comes the greatest of all hymns, and one of the greatest of all poems, the Dies Iræ. There have been attempts—more than one of them—to make out that the Dies Iræ is no such wonderful thing after all: attempts which are, perhaps, the extreme examples of that cheap and despicable paradox which thinks to escape the charge of blind docility by the affectation of heterodox independence. The judgment of the greatest (and not always of the most pious) men of letters of modern times may confirm those who are uncomfortable without authority in a different opinion. Fortunately there is not likely ever to be lack of those who, authority or no authority, in youth and in age, after much reading or without much, in all time of their tribulation and in all time of their wealth, will hold these wonderful triplets, be they Thomas of Celano's or another's, as nearly or quite the most perfect wedding of sound to sense that they know.
The Dies Iræ.
It would be possible, indeed, to illustrate a complete dissertation on the methods of expression in serious poetry from the fifty-one lines of the Dies Iræ. Rhyme, alliteration, cadence, and adjustment of vowel and consonant values,—all these things receive perfect expression in it, or, at least, in the first thirteen stanzas, for the last four are a little inferior. It is quite astonishing to reflect upon the careful art or the felicitous accident of such a line as
with the thud of the trochee[9] falling in each instance in a different vowel; and still more on the continuous sequence of five stanzas, from Judex ergo to non sit cassus, in which not a word could be displaced or replaced by another without loss. The climax of verbal harmony, corresponding to and expressing religious passion and religious awe, is reached in the last—
"Quærens me sedisti lassus,
Redemisti crucem passus:
Tantus labor non sit cassus!"—
where the sudden change from the dominant e sounds (except in the rhyme foot) of the first two lines to the a's of the last is simply miraculous, and miraculously assisted by what may be called the internal sub-rhyme of sedisti and redemisti. This latter effect can rarely be attempted without a jingle: there is no jingle here, only an ineffable melody. After the Dies Iræ, no poet could say that any effect of poetry was, as far as sound goes, unattainable, though few could have hoped to equal it, and perhaps no one except Dante and Shakespeare has fully done so.
Beside the grace and the grandeur, the passion and the art, of this wonderful composition, even the best remaining examples of mediæval hymn-writing may look a little pale. It is possible for criticism, which is not hypercriticism, to object to the pathos of the Stabat, that it is a trifle luscious, to find fault with the rhyme-scheme of Jesu dulcis memoria, that it is a little faint and frittered; while, of course, those who do not like conceits and far-fetched interpretations can always quarrel with the substance of Adam of St Victor. But those who care for merits rather than for defects will never be weary of admiring the best of these hymns, or of noticing and, as far as possible, understanding their perfection. Although the language they use is old, and their subjects are those which very competent and not at all irreligious critics have denounced as unfavourable to poetry, the special poetical charm, as we conceive it in modern days, is not merely present in them, but is present in a manner of which few traces can be found in classical times. And some such students, at least, will probably go on to examine the details of the hymn-writers' method, with the result of finding more such things as have been pointed out above.
The rhythm of Bernard.