The Latin Hymn-writers and Their Hymns

by Samuel Willoughby Duffield

Those sequences of which Robert was the possible author are printed in Migne’s Patrologia (141, 959 ff.). Only one of them merits a word of notice. It is the Te lucis auctor personent. Daniel assigns this to the fourteenth or fifteenth century, but Mone and Koch to the fifth. These last are probably right. It is early found in the Anglo-Saxon Church and is among the old Vatican MSS. and the hymns collected by G. Cassander. It is scarcely possible that it comes down as late as the eleventh century.

Robert’s other sequences are six in number and of no importance. His personal history is pathetic enough. He was the son of Hugh Capet; born at Orleans in 970 and died at Melun, July 20th, 1031, having been sole king since 996, though he had been crowned in 988. His first wife was Susanne, an Italian princess; and we learn from his contemporary, Richer of Rheims, that one of his first public acts was to repudiate her on the plea that she was too old for him, and that he refused to restore her dowry. His next marriage was with his distant cousin Bertha—a cousin four times removed—the widow of the Count of Blois. This marriage was inconvenient to the Emperor Otho, as it would have brought the House of Capet into the line of succession to certain lordships in the old Kingdom of Burgundy. So Pope Gregory V., the kinsman of Otho, required Robert to give up Bertha, not because Susanne was still alive, but because the Church forbade the marriage of cousins in even the fourth degree. At first Robert refused, but when his kingdom was laid under an interdict, he showed as little manhood in standing by his second wife as he had shown humanity and justice to his first. Such a ban was too severe to be borne and the king yielded, though Baronius says he tried to take back his wife Bertha in spite of it all. His life and kingship belong to French history, and can be found there. His disposition was that of a monk and not of a monarch. He founded four monasteries and built seven churches. He supported three hundred paupers entirely and a thousand in part. His reign lasted—thanks to ecclesiastical influence—for thirty-four years. It was troubled and not especially pleasant; and for his third wife the king had married the handsome shrew Constance, the daughter of William Count of Arles. Pious and excellent man that he is reputed to have been, he had a natural son, Amauri, who was great-great-grandfather to Simon de Montfort. Truly, when all is said and done, Robert II. is hardly the author in whom we would like to believe with all our hearts when we sing—

“Holy Spirit, come and shine

Sweetly in this heart of mine.”

Per contra, Hermann of Reichenau grows more interesting the more he is studied. He has been so unfortunate as to be confused with other persons in two or three cases. By Brander he is identified with Hartmann of St. Gall, and the sequence Rex omnipotens is taken from him.[8] The pretty little sequence, Veni Sancte Spiritus et reple, which Königsfeld thinks to be his, is doubtless no earlier than the fourteenth century and by some anonymous composer who has merely imitated the great masters.

Beside the Rex omnipotens he composed the Ave praeclara maris stella, where his name gains another misprint and becomes “Heinricus, monachus San Gallensis.” This poem was thought worthy of the authorship of Albertus Magnus (Albert von Regensburg), and to him accordingly Wackernagel and Koch credit it. Mone has vindicated the claim of Hermann which is set forth in Migne. (Patrologia, 143; 20 ff.) So that we are again sure of a piece which has been meritorious enough to be coveted.

Then comes the antiphon Simon Barjona, which Du Meril calls Simon Baronia and of which no trace remains. Two other sequences are, however, extant, and are beyond any question or debate. They are the Salve regina, which Daniel calls a “most celebrated antiphon,” and the Alma redemptoris mater, the refrain of which Chaucer used in that “Prioress’s Tale,” which Wordsworth has modernized.

In addition we must observe that the Veni Sancte is attributed to Hermann simultaneously and by the same authority as that which credits him with the other sequences. Two pieces—Vox haec melos pangat and Gratus honos hierarchia—are lost. But the Salve regina was worth contending for; and Gerbert names Gregory II., Peter of Compostella, St. Bernard, and “Adhemar, Episcopus Podiensis” (Bishop of Puy and his own candidate) together with Hermannus Contractus. Nevertheless, Trithemius, Gerbert, and, indeed, everybody are heard to declare that Hermann was “the marvel of the age,” the best man of his time in music and the author of a work on metrical rules. He is known as Doctor Egregius, and it is beyond any peradventure that he was capable of writing the Veni Sancte.

The only arguments that are employed to prove that Robert was the author are very weak. The first is that there was no sufficient competitor. But surely Hermannus Contractus is now a competitor of real merit and importance. Then, too, the king was a kind of religious pet, and such persons receive more than their due. But the second argument is weaker still. It amounts in brief to the harmony displayed in the poem between the king’s life and his lovely verses. It strikes one, however, that an invalid like Hermann might have had fully as deep a religious experience as any such king. Moreover—and this is a vital fact—the Veni Sancte is found in the German hymnaries almost exclusively. This point was insisted upon in the controversy about the Veni, Creator; and Charles the Great in this respect had the advantage over Gregory the Great, until the claim of Rabanus Maurus, another German, was thoroughly examined. But among all the sources carefully edited by Kehrein from Daniel, Mone, and elsewhere, the French collections do not present themselves. On the contrary, in this elaborate list we find St. Gall, Kreuzlingen, Freiburg, Karlsruhe, Mainz, Ebersberg, Rome (1481), Venice (1497), with later examples printed at Cologne, Prague, Eichstettin, Lubeck, and Basel. Brander also found the hymn in the earliest codices of the three great neighboring cloisters of St. Gall, Einsiedeln, and Reichenau. Meanwhile the only notice of it in France comes from the Paris Breviary, which is of recent date.

There is but one consideration further. I trust that I have established the perfect possibility that Hermannus Contractus might have been the author equally as well as Robert. The men lived in the same period to which, on the testimony of the best critics, the hymn is considered to belong. They were alike in possibilities of Christian experience and of musical and poetical temperament. But here they begin to diverge; and the preference is decidedly in favor of Hermann, whose hymn is found in the three oldest codices of his own neighborhood; of St. Gall, where he studied; of Einsiedeln, where it is possible that he was a resident; and of Reichenau, where he certainly lived from the age of thirty until his death. He could scarcely have gone about very much in his helpless and crippled condition; and these three conventual establishments are within a moderate distance of each other. From his seventh year he was to be discovered always somewhere in that vicinity, and the historians of St. Gall and of Reichenau positively claim the Veni Sancte as his.