Peter the Venerable died on December 25th, 1156; but how or with what surroundings we are not told. He was buried beside his old comrade, Henry of Blois, Bishop of Winchester, within the walls of the church which Innocent II. consecrated upon his memorable visit to Cluny. And the Histoire Litteraire breaks out into an unusual eulogy; and declares that in his case the title of “Venerable” was no less honorable than that of “Saint.” They did not make “saints” out of such men as Peter—and I don’t quite see why they should. There was too much flesh-and-blood reality about him, too little of musty theology and altogether too little bigotry. But somehow the broad-faced happy sun proves himself to be the “greater light;” while the moon goes palely on, a ghost in an unaccustomed sky.
CHAPTER XXI.
BERNARD OF CLUNY.
In the twelfth century—the time of the great Crusades—we find the noblest and purest of Latin hymns. It is the age of Hildebert, Abelard, Bernard of Clairvaux, Peter of Cluny, and Adam of St. Victor. But among them all I find no one who has inspired a deeper and more lovely desire for the heavenly land than Bernard of Cluny.
The information about him is very meagre. He was born at Morlaix in Brittany, of English parents. He seems to have attained to no ecclesiastical dignity—such men seldom care for baubles and trinkets. But his is as true a soul as ever burned like a star on a summer night, against the warm, obscure, palpitating heaven of eternal hope. The date of his prominence is fixed by the fact that Peter the Venerable was his abbot, and it is therefore included between 1122 and 1156. I have (in The Heavenly Land) myself assigned the Laus Patriae Coelestis—his famous and only poem, which is addressed to Abbot Peter, to 1145 or thereabouts.
His single up-gush of melody is a lamentation over the evil condition of the times in which he lives. They were indeed days to sadden the soul of the saint; and he called his poem De Contemptu Mundi; for he despised the immundus mundus—the foul world in which he was forced to remain. It consists of some three thousand lines of dactylic hexameter, and was first published (so says Trench, who is its step-parent) by Matthias Flacius Illyricus in his scarce and little known supplement to the Catalogus Testium Veritatis. In this “Catalogue of Witnesses to the Truth” he gathers all those who have testified against the papacy, and the supplement, Varia doctorum piorumque Virorum de Corrupto Ecclesiae Statu Poemata (1556), is made up of hymns and poems in which the pious within the Church, as well as without her walls, sorrowed over her corruption.
Bernard’s poem is sometimes known, therefore, by his own title, De Contemptu Mundi, and sometimes by that given by Trench to his cento of about one hundred lines, Laus Patriae Coelestis, the “Praise of the Heavenly Land.” From this cento one would derive altogether an erroneous idea of the whole; but Dr. Neale, who wrote with the full text before him, although he paraphrased but part of it, tells us that the poem, in great part, is a bitter satire on the fearful wickedness of the times. It was the part Trench passed by for which Matthias Flacius Illyricus, its first editor, cared the most. The sins and greediness of the Court of Rome are the theme of the eighty-five lines he has embodied in the text of the Catalogus itself. By both that and the poems of his supplement, he sought to justify the Protestant Reformation on the side of Christian discipline and morals.[10]
The translators have had a hard problem in Bernard’s poem, and but few have attempted to “bend the bow of Ulysses.” Dr. Neale has achieved the most popular and useful result, in the version from which “Jerusalem the Golden” has been extracted, but he does not pretend to literalness. “My own translation,” he says, “is so free as to be little more than an imitation.” Dr. Coles has gone straight away from the dactyls and made a version in anapests—a metre which does not do justice to Bernard. Archbishop Trench has rendered a few lines in the same measure as the original. I have myself followed (in 1867) the exact metre and rhyme of the original poem; but such a version is rather curious than useful. The translation signed by “O. A. M., Cherry Valley,” is in its typography, while fine and clear, affectedly antique. The metrical power of this version is inferior. It is dactylic but not fluent, and does not at all represent the original. That by Mr. Gerard Moultrie is praised by Dr. Trench as metrically close and poetically beautiful. I have no hesitation in saying it is the best version which has appeared in English. It seems to keep both to the spirit and the letter of the original, and is in all respects a remarkable achievement. It, however, omits the double rhyme, and thus avoids the chief difficulty of a reproduction of the form of the original. That by Rev. Jackson Mason (1880) will not stand a comparison with Mr. Moultrie’s, as it halts and breaks in its measure and produces an effect on the ear far from pleasant.
The difficulty of translation is due entirely to the character of the verse. Bernard himself declares “unless that spirit of wisdom and understanding had been with me, and flowed in upon so difficult a metre, I could not have composed so long a work.” Not that this form of verse was original with him. Peter Damiani has used it in one of his hymns to our Lord’s mother:
“O miseratrix, O dominatrix, praecipe dictu
Ne devastemur, ne lapidemur, grandinis ictu.”