Now, what a change! Henry Beauclerc was from the first his friend, as William Rufus to the last had been his enemy. Hitherto Hildebert has appeared weakly endeavouring to elude destruction, and perhaps with no unshaken loyalty in his bosom toward any cause except his dire necessities. Henceforth, sailing a calmer sea, he repays Henry’s favour with adherence and admiration. He has no support to offer Anselm of Canterbury, still struggling with the English monarchy over investitures; nor has he one word of censure for the clever cold-eyed scholar King who kept his brother, Robert of Normandy, a prisoner for twenty-eight years till he died.
Hildebert had still thirty years of life before him; nor were they all to be untroubled. Shortly after the Red King’s death, he made a voyage to Rome, to obtain the papal benediction. To judge from his poems, he was deeply impressed with the ruins of the ancient city. Returning he devoted himself to the affairs of his diocese and to rebuilding the cathedral and other churches of Le Mans. In 1125, in spite of his unwillingness, for he was seventy years old, he was enthroned Archbishop of Tours, where he was to be worried by disputes with Louis le Gros of France over investitures. But he acquitted himself with vigour, especially through his letters. A famous one relates to this struggle of his closing years:
“In adversity it is a comfort to hope for happier times. Long has this hope flattered me; and as the harvest in the fields cheers the countryman, the expectation of a fair season has comforted my soul. But now I no longer hope for the clearing of the cloudy weather, nor see where the storm-driven ship, on whose deck I sit, may gain the harbour of rest.
“Friends are silent; silent are the priests of Jesus Christ. And those also are silent through whose prayers I thought the king would be reconciled with me. I thought indeed, but in their silence the king has added to the pain of my wounds. Yet it was theirs to resist the injury to the canonical institutes of the Church. Theirs was it, if the matter had demanded it, to raise a wall before the house of Israel. Yet with the most serene king there is call for exhortation rather than threat, for advice rather than command, for instruction rather than the rod. By these he should have been drawn to agree, by these reverently taught not to sheath his arrows in an aged priest, nor make void the canonical laws, nor persecute the ashes of a church already buried, ashes in which I eat the bread of grief, in which I drink the cup of mourning, from which to be snatched away and escape is to pass from death to life.
“Yet amid these dire straits, anger has never triumphed over me, that I should raise a hue and cry against the anointed of the Lord, or wrest peace from him with the strong hand and by the arm of the Church. Suspect is the peace to which high potentates are brought not by love, but by force. Easily is it broken, and sometimes the final state is worse than the first. There is another way by which, Christ leading, I can better reach it. I will cast my thought upon the Lord, and He will give me the desire of my heart. The Lord remembered Joseph, forgotten by Pharaoh’s chief butler when prosperity had returned to him; He remembered David abandoned by his own son. Perhaps He will remember even me, and bring the tossing ship to rest on the desired shore. He it is who looks upon the petition of the meek, and does not spurn their prayers. He it is in whose hand the hearts of kings are wax. If I shall have found grace in His eyes, I shall easily obtain the grace of the king or advantageously lose it. For to offend man for the sake of God is to win God’s grace.”[216]
Hildebert was a classical scholar, and in his time unmatched as a writer of Latin prose and verse. Many of his elegiac poems survive, some of them so antique in sentiment and so correct in metre as to have been taken for products of the pagan period. One of the best is an elegy on Rome obviously inspired by his visit to that city of ruins:
“Par tibi, Roma, nihil, cum sis prope tota ruina.”
Its closing lines are interesting:
“Hic superûm formas superi mirantur et ipsi,
Et cupiunt fictis vultibus esse pares.
Non potuit natura deos hoc ore creare
Quo miranda deûm signa creavit homo.
Vultus adest his numinibus, potiusque coluntur
Artificum studio quam deitate sua.
Urbs felix, si vel dominis urbs illa careret,
Vel dominis esset turpe carere fide!”
Such phrases, such frank admiration for the idols of pagan Rome, are startling from the pen of a contemporary of St. Bernard. The spell of the antique lay on Hildebert, as on others of his time. “The gods themselves marvel at their own images, and desire to equal their sculptured forms. Nature was unable to make gods with such visages as man has created in these wondrous images of the gods. There is a look (vultus) about these deities, and they are worshipped for the skill of the sculptor rather than for their divinity.”[217] Hildebert was not only a bishop, he was a Christian; but the sense and feeling of ancient Rome had entered into him. Besides the poem just quoted, he wrote another, either in Rome or after his return, Christian in thought but most antique in sympathy and turn of phrase.