In making an exhaustive index of all the originals before us, these collections soon dwindle into a very diminutive form. There are about three thousand five hundred hymns in the various books. And they are of all sorts—good, bad, and indifferent. The good are the pure and true utterance of pious spirits—such lyrics as the Veni, Redemptor, and the Veni, Sancte Spiritus, and the Vexilla Regis. The positively bad are those which are either poor in execution—a common fault—or decidedly defective in religious tone. Many so-called “hymns” are nothing but plagiaries or parodies upon older compositions. Some are debased into mere patchwork. There are a few which are macaronic, and a great many in which poverty of phrase is helped out by wholesale pilfering. Moreover, it is easy to find those which are highly objectionable in point of taste and theology, to say nothing of prosody or Protestantism. And if Protestants are principally energetic in restoring and editing these hymns, to the frank and generous extent of overlooking what is unpleasant in them, it ought to follow that they should not be blamed for preferring only those lyrics in which the broad and Christian fervor of devout souls can be observed.
Of those hymns which are upon the border line, the pathetic Stabat Mater may stand as an example. It would be bigotry to reject it from the list—as one compiler has done—while it would certainly not be fair to Protestants to utilize it, in any close translation, for the worship of the Church universal.
Perhaps there are not less than from four to five hundred of these hymns, then, to which no cause of blame can attach—which are as dear to the Church of the Roman Catholics as to that of the Catholic Protestants. On such common ground the heartiest sympathy and co-operation can develop the riches which yet remain. Already it is Caswall, the priest, and Newman, the cardinal, and Neale, the ritualist, who have given to our daily praise the happiest versions. It is Ozanam who has discovered several unknown hymns; and Gautier and Digby S. Wrangham who have brought out Adam of St. Victor; and the ninety-seven pieces of Abaelard are reprinted from Cousin’s text in Migne’s Patrologia. The study of these sacred verses has been comparatively limited in range and nationality, but it has had the incomparable advantage of being thorough.
Thus we are to-day possessed of the text of every really fine sacred Latin lyric. Somewhere or other it has bloomed and has been gathered by some acute hymnologist. The text, too, is tolerably clarified. Translations into our own tongue have been made by such men as Caswall and Newman and Neale (who have rendered all the hymns of the Roman Breviary), and by Mant, Chandler, Pearson, Kynaston, and many others. In America the Rev. Dr. Washburn, Dr. Coles, and Chancellor Benedict have been as prolific as any. Scattered renderings have obtained place in various hymnals. And we are now prepared at last for the general and popular interest which should be taken in this vast treasure of the Latin tongue.
Nothing is more surprising than the utter misinformation which prevails. A few scholars, like Dr. Schaff and Dr. William R. Williams, have endeavored to illuminate our American darkness. But, speaking only now of the Latin hymns, the story of their authors remains obscure and the romantic history of their origin remains for the most part untouched.
Yet Prudentius, the Spaniard, was a classic survival in Spain. And Damasus, the pope, was associated with certain dramatic scenes. And Venantius Fortunatus, troubadour and bishop, furnishes us with a most striking portrait of the times in his attachment to the abbess-queen, Radegunda. The list presumably includes Elpis, the wife of Boethius, the “last of the Romans;” and Coelius Sedulius, the Briton; and Gregory the Great and the great archbishop, Rabanus Maurus, and perhaps Robert II. of France. It calls into fresh life the histories of the Venerable Bede and of Alcuin; of the two Bernards, the one of Clairvaux and the other of Cluny; of Peter the Venerable and of Abaelard and Heloise; of Adam of St. Victor, and Thomas of Celano; of Bonaventura and Aquinas and à Kempis and Xavier. It shows us that mad Solomon, poor Jacoponus; and it leaves us with verses from John Huss, the martyr, to be read by the light of the Reformation’s dawn.
Thus largely does the subject of the Latin hymns traverse the ages. From the fourth to the sixteenth centuries of the Christian era it is the one stream which was fed from Alpine or from Pyrenean snows—a “river of God that is full of water,” which expands into the stately movement of the Notkerian and Gottschalkian sequence, or gently murmurs its song of trust with the missionary Xavier as he writes the exquisite melody of that hymn, O Deus, ego amo te! To understand and to love these lyrics is to be better fitted for this nineteenth century of praise. Not the persecutors and the injurious, not the cruel and the cold-hearted will then remain to us; but the Dies Irae will utter its trumpet-voice above the dead phrases of a formal service, and the Salve caput cruentatum will call us afresh to the foot of the cross.
CHAPTER III.
HILARY OF POITIERS AND THE EARLIEST LATIN HYMNS.
When Master Peter Abaelard was preparing his own hymns for use in the Abbey of the Paraclete, he prefaced them with a brief treatise. There were ninety-three of them, arranged for all the services of Heloise and her nuns, and he answers the request of his abbess-wife by sending them, somewhere in the neighborhood of the year 1135. “At the instance of thy requests, my sister Heloise,” he writes, “formerly dear in the world and now most dear in Christ, I have composed what are called in Greek, ‘hymns,’ and in Hebrew, ‘tillim.’” For it is plain that she has a vivid recollection of his “wild, unhallowed rhymes, writ in his unbaptized times,” and she would now have him tune his lyre, as Robert Herrick did, to a loftier strain.
Hence he made for these gentle sisters a hymn-book of their own, and so became the Watts or Wesley of their matins and vespers. With characteristic self-confidence he only included what he had himself prepared; but this introduction casts a great deal of light upon the knowledge and piety of the time respecting hymns.