Of stubborn souls, this glory kindleth so
That the pure flame against the sap will glow
And be by nothing finally withstood—
The smoke itself be parted to and fro,
Until clear light shall shine in constant good.”
Richard was the disciple and successor of this gentle-spirited Hugo. In 1114 the priory became an abbacy, and when Richard was prior in 1162, he had for abbot no very godly person, since under Ervisius all discipline was relaxed, and scandal and sensuality began to rule. But Richard stood out stoutly and with good judgment; and he lived to see the old harmony and glory return again. In his day and in that of Adam, which was contemporaneous with his, the school represented the dialectical and theologic, rather than the spiritual and mystical side of religion; and yet it did good work, as a peacemaker, for the truth. It gives us little enough, however, with which to fall in love. Massive it may be, and intricate in its curious ability respecting useless pieces of chop-logic, but the profound piety which belongs to every age and clime did not find much to comfort it at St. Victor. These men dug shafts and tunnels, they did not open foundations and sink wells down to living streams.
Adam of St. Victor, as I have said, lived in those days, and they produced their natural effect upon his mind and upon his writings. He died somewhere between 1172 and 1192; and while he was celebrated as the expositor of St. Jerome’s prefaces to the books of the Bible, and was known as the composer of “sequences, rhythms, and other writings,” his fame rests upon his modern rediscovery by Monsieur Gautier. The history of the preservation of his hymns is itself a suggestive commentary on the difficulties of Latin hymnology, and so I give it entire.
Clichtove, a Flemish theologian of the period between 1500 and 1550, undertook to help his brethren to comprehend the offices of the Church. His Elucidatorium Ecclesiasticum was first published in Paris in 1515, and then at Basle in 1517 and 1519. There were four subsequent editions—that of Paris (1556) being the best, and that of Cologne (1732) being the latest. Now this book was the great mine for Latin hymns before Daniel, Trench, Mone, Königsfeld, March, and others made them accessible. And of Adam of St. Victor he gives thirty-six specimens, which were supposed to be all that had remained, with one or two possible exceptions.
In 1855 J. P. Migne published in his Patrologiae Cursus, in volume 196, these thirty-six hymns of Adam of St. Victor. Archbishop Trench, who is such an admirer of our poet, has doubtless been indebted to the many helpful Latin notes, with which the excellent editor of the Patrologia has enriched the obscurity of his author. At least so it seems to a person who compares Trench’s own notes with that Latin.
Monsieur Gautier, however, determined to look further, the result being that he published the Oeuvres Poetiques d’ Adam de St. Victor in 1858 at Paris. This gives us one hundred and six hymns—of which Trench says that some of them were well known but anonymous; and others are strictly new, and fully equal to his best compositions. From this source, then, the two great admirers of Adam of St. Victor—Archbishop Trench and Dr. Neale—have drawn their originals.