I am not surprised that theologians should enjoy such a poet as Adam. He is so terse, so dialectically subtle, so metaphysically accurate, so allegorically copious. In a line he often makes a reference which his editor struggles to catch in a foot-note a page long. And you must comprehend the reference in order to comprehend the poem! As I read the eulogy of Trench, I find him saying that when we remember Adam of St. Victor’s theologic lore, his frequent and admirable use of Scripture, his art and variety in versification, his “skill in conducting a story,” and his own personal feeling which permeates his poems, we must put him “foremost among the sacred Latin poets of the Middle Ages.” Dr. Neale, too, calls him “the greatest of mediaeval poets.” And so, “what shall he do that cometh after the King?” For, in spite of this mighty commendation, and in spite of the praise which these didactic hymns have obtained, we cannot and do not sing any of them. Even Dr. Neale cannot make them singable, though he would probably do it if he could.
I must confess—and take the risk of being charged with stupidity and ignorance—that I cannot place Adam of St. Victor where they have set him. Southey’s ballads and poems are legion, as we know, and they are learned beyond all cavilling; but they will not live like the two or three little things of Motherwell. And Adam’s vast congeries of sequences, composed for all the saints and festivals of the calendar, cannot stand an instant against the sweetness of Bernard of Clairvaux, or the grandeur of Peter Damiani’s judgment hymn. These others, it is true, wrote less, but they wrote subjectively, and hence they appealed to the heart of the Christian in every age. For verse alone, however skilful, is not poetry; and the celebration of saints and angels, however beautifully accomplished, ministers nothing to “a mind diseased.” We need to feel a genius which kindles its watch-fire in the line of signal—as did Helena’s watchers between Jerusalem and Constantinople. Then, as this flame flares up into the night, we know that it speaks to us of the discovery of the true cross.
I am thus compelled to dissent from the cultus which has grown up about this brilliant, epigrammatic, and altogether admirable Adam. For he attracts by his obscurity and he surprises by his intricacy; and the interest excited is that of the scholar and of the translator, rather than that of the popular approval of the Christians of to-day. And I am glad to support this opinion, not merely by the rather caustic comment of Professor March, but by the word of Mrs. Charles, where she speaks of “his elaborate system of Scriptural types occasionally chilling the genuine fire of his verse into a catalogue of images.” And I must add, for my own justification, that this “fire” is the fire of the orator, and not altogether that of the poet. It is objective and not subjective; for though there be two kinds of poetry in the world, we cannot doubt which kind it is that “permanently pleases and takes commonly with all classes of men”—for this was Aristotle’s unequalled definition.
It is time that we should take a glance at this laureate of St. Victor, whose monumental plate of copper remained, down to the date of the first Revolution, near the door of the choir in that ancient cloister. The epitaph upon it was mainly drawn from his own work. It breathes the same contempt of earth and derision of its vanities, which we find so common in that age.
“Vana salus hominis, vanus decor, omnia vana;
Inter vana nihil vanius est homine.”
“Vain is the welfare of man and his fashion, for all things are vanity;
And, in the midst of vanity, nothing is vainer than man.”
It was a later hand than his own which, after selecting those ten lines from Adam’s own writings, added four very inferior verses to complete the inscription. These state that:
“I who lie here, the unfortunate and wretched (miser et miserabilis) Adam, ask one prayer as my highest reward: I have sinned; I confess; I seek pardon; spare the contrite. Spare me, father; spare me, brethren; spare me, God.”