The Latin Hymn-writers and Their Hymns

by Samuel Willoughby Duffield

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.