| “(1) Canat omnis turba | ||||
| (2a) | Fonte renata Spiritusque gratia | (2b) | Laude jucunda et mente perspicua | |
| (3a) | Jam restituta pars est decima fuerat quae culpa perdita. | (3b) | Sicque jactura coelestis illa completur in laude divina. | |
| (4a) | Ecce praeclara dies dominica | (4b) | Enitet ampla per orbis spatia, | |
| (5a) | Exsultat in qua plebs omnis redempta, | (5b) | Quia destructa mors est perpetua.”[313] | |
A Sequence of the eleventh century will afford a final illustration of approach to a regular strophic structure, and of the use of the final one-syllable rhyme in a, throughout the Sequence:
1
“Alleluia,
Turma, proclama leta;
Laude canora,
Facta prome divina,
Jam instituta
Superna disciplina,
2
Christi sacra
Per magnalia
Es quia de morte liberata
Ut destructa
Inferni claustra
Januaque celi patefacta!
3
Jam nunc omnia
Celestia
Terrestria
Virtute gubernat eterna.
In quibus sua
Judicia
Semper equa
Dat auctoritate paterna.”
····[314]
As the eleventh century closed and the great twelfth century dawned, the forces of mediaeval growth quickened to a mightier vitality, and distinctively mediaeval creations appeared. Our eyes, of course, are fixed upon the northern lands, where the Sequence grew from prose to verse, and where derivative or analogous forms of popular poetry developed also. Up to this time, throughout mediaeval life and thought, progress had been somewhat uncrowned with palpable achievement. Yet the first brilliant creations of a master-workman are the fruit of his apprentice years, during which his progress has been as real as when his works begin to make it visible. So it was no sudden birth of power, but rather faculties ripening through apprentice centuries, which illumine the period opening about the year 1100. This period would carry no human teaching if its accomplishment in institutions, in philosophy, in art and poetry, had been a heaven-blown accident, and not the fruit of antecedent discipline.
The poetic advance represented by the Sequences of Adam of St. Victor may rouse our admiration for the poet’s genius, but should not blind our eyes to the continuity of development leading to it. Adam is the final artist and his work a veritable creation; yet his antecedents made part of his creative faculty. The elements of his verses and the general idea and form of the sequence were given him;—all honour to the man’s holy genius which made these into poems. The elements referred to consisted in accentual measures and in the two-syllabled Latin rhyme which appears to have been finally achieved by the close of the eleventh century.[315] In using them Adam was no borrower, but an artist who perforce worked in the medium of his art. Trochaic and iambic rhythms then constituted the chief measures for accentual verse, as they had for centuries, and do still. For, although accentual rhythms admit dactyls and anapaests, these have not proved generally serviceable. Likewise the inevitable progress of Latin verse had developed assonances into rhymes; and indeed into rhymes of two syllables, for Latin words lend themselves as readily to rhymes of two syllables as English words to rhymes of one.
There existed also the idea and form of the Sequence, consisting of pairs of lines which had reached assonance and some degree of rhythm, and varied in length, pair by pair, following the music of the melodies to which they were sung. For the Sequence-melody did not keep to the same recurring tune throughout, but varied from couplet to couplet. In consequence, a Sequence by Adam of St. Victor may contain a variety of verse-forms. Moreover, a number of the Sequences of which he may have been the author show survivals of the old rhythmical irregularities, and of assonance as yet unsuperseded by pure rhyme.
Before giving examples of Adam’s poems, a tribute should be paid to his great forerunner in the art of Latin verse. Adam doubtless was familiar with the hymns[316] of the most brilliant intellectual luminary of the departing generation, one Peter Abaelard, whom he may have seen in the flesh. Those once famous love-songs, written for Heloïse, perished (so far as we know) with the love they sang. Another fate—and perhaps Abaelard wished it so—was in store for the many hymns which he wrote for his sisters in Christ, the abbess and her nuns. They still exist,[317] and display a richness of verse-forms scarcely equalled even by the Sequences of Adam. In the development of Latin verse, Abaelard is Adam’s immediate predecessor; his verses being, as it were, just one stage inferior to Adam’s in sonorousness of line, in certainty of rhythm, and in purity of rhyme.
The “prose” Sequences were not the direct antecedents of Abaelard’s hymns. Yet both sprang from the freely devising spirit of melody and song; and therefore those hymns are of this free-born lineage more truly than they are descendants of antique forms. To be sure, every possible accentual rhythm, built as it must be of trochees, iambics, anapaests, or dactyls, has unavoidably some antique quantitative antecedent; because the antique measures exhausted the possibilities of syllabic combination. Yet antecedence is not source, and most of Abaelard’s verses by their form and spirit proclaim their genesis in the creative exigencies of song as loudly as they disavow any antique parentage.
For example, there may be some far echo of metrical asclepiads in the following accentual and rhyme-harnessed twelve-syllable verse: