“You know, my reader, what hymns they sing everywhere in the temples, that they are almost all faulty, silly, full of barbarism, and composed without reference to the number of feet or the quantity of the syllables, so as to excite educated persons to laughter, and to bring priests, if they are men of letters, to despise the services of the Church. I say men of letters. As for those who are not, and who are the gluttons of the Roman curia, or who have no wisdom, it is enough for them to stand like dragons close by the sacred ark, or to drift about like the clouds, to live like idle bellies, given over to the pursuit of sleep, good living, sensual pleasures, and to gather up the money by which they make themselves hucksters in religion and plunderers of the Christian people and practice their deceits upon both gods and men equally, until the vine of the Lord degenerates into a wild plant.”
The Italianized Greek would see no difference between a Tetzel and a Ferreri. But there still were sincerely good people who relished the old hymns better than the polished paganism of the Bishop of Guarda-Alfieri. Ferreri’s hymns struck no root in spite of the favor of two Medicean popes. They seem never to have reached a second edition. Their frankly pagan vocabulary for the expression of Christian ideas seems to have been too much for even the humanists.
Bishop Ferreri does not seem to have lived to prepare his shorter and easier Breviary after the same elegant but unsuitable fashion as his hymns. So Clement VII. put the preparation of a new Breviary into the hands of another and a better man, Cardinal Francesco de Quiñonez. He was a Spanish Franciscan, had been general of his order, and was made Cardinal by Clement in acknowledgment of diplomatic services. He enjoyed the confidence of the Emperor Charles V., and used it to rescue the Pope from his detention in the Castle of San Angelo, when he was besieged there after the taking of Rome by the Imperial troops in 1529. This is hardly the kind of record which would lead us to look for a reformer under the red hat of our cardinal. But, so far as the Breviary was concerned, he proved himself too rigorous a reformer, if anything. His work was governed by two leading principles. The first was to simplify the services by dropping out those parts which had been added last. The second was to use the space thus obtained to insert ampler Scripture lessons and more Psalms, so that, as in earlier times, the Bible might be read through once a year and the Psalter once a week. It is this last feature which has elicited the praise of Protestant liturgists, and it is known that the Breviary of Quiñonez furnished the basis for the services of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, excepting, of course, the Communion Service. But unfortunately hymnologists are not able to join in this praise. To get the Psalms said or sung through once a week, he dealt nearly as ruthlessly with the hymns as if he were a Seceder.
His Breviary appeared in 1535,[20] and for thirty-three years its use was permitted to ecclesiastics in their private recitation of the hours. It appeared in a large number of editions in different parts of Europe, so that its use must have been extensive. But it did not pass unchallenged. The doctors of the Sorbonne at Paris hurried into the arena with their condemnation of it before the ink was fully dry on the first copies. They declared it a thing unheard of to introduce into Church use a book which was the production of a single author, and he—as they wrongly alleged—not even a member of any religious order. Furthermore, he had so shortened and eviscerated the legends for the saints’ days, besides omitting many, that nobody could tell what virtues and what miracles entitled them to commemoration. Above all he had omitted Peter Damiani’s Little Office of the Blessed Virgin! Much better founded was the objection to the omission of parts long established in use, such as the antiphons and many of the hymns. Here we must side with the Sorbonne against Quiñonez.
It was not until 1568 that the present Roman Breviary appeared. When the Council of Trent met in its final session in 1562, the first drafts of a reformed Breviary and Missal were transmitted to the Fathers by Pius IV.; but they were too busy with questions of discipline to do more than return these with their approbation. The work was published by Pius V. in July, 1568, and its use was made obligatory upon all dioceses which had not had a Breviary of their own in use for two hundred years previously. This is in substance the Breviary now in use throughout the Roman Catholic Church. It underwent, however, two further revisions. That under Clement VIII., finished in 1602, was by a commission in which Cardinals Bellarmine, Baronius, and Silvius Antonianus were members. That under Urban VIII., completed in 1631, concerns us more directly, and especially the part of it which was effected by three learned Jesuits: Famiano Strada, Hieronimo Petrucci, and Tarquinio Galucci, who had in their hands the revision of the hymns.
The three revisers, all of them poets of some distinction, and the first famous for his history of the wars in the Low Countries, had to steer a middle course in the matter of revision. None of them were radical humanists after the fashion of Zacharia Ferreri; that fashion, indeed, had gone out with the rise of the counter-reformation and of the great order to which they belonged. Yet in the matter of “metre and Latinity,” of which Ferreri boasted on his title page a hundred years before, the revival of classical scholarship had established a standard to which the old hymns even of the Ambrosian period did not conform. The revisers profess their anxiety to make as few changes as possible; but Pope Urban, in his bull Psalmodiam sanctam prefixed to the book, announces that all the hymns—except the very few which made no pretension to metrical form—had been conformed to the laws of prosody and of the Latin tongue, those which could not be amended in any milder way being rewritten throughout. Bartolomeo Gavanti, a member of the Commission of Revision, but laboring in another department, tells us that more than nine hundred alterations were made for the sake of correct metre, with the result of changing the first lines of more than thirty of the ninety-six hymns the Breviary then contained; that the three by Aquinas on the sacrament, the Ave Maris stella, the Custodes hominum, and a very few others, were left as they were.
This, then, is the genesis of the class of hymns designated in the collections as traceable no farther back than the Roman Breviary. Some of them are original, being the work of Silvius Antonianus, Bellarmine, or Urban VIII. himself, or of authors of that age whose authorship has not been traced. But the greater part are recasts of ancient hymns to meet the demands of the humanist standards of metre and Latinity.
It is not easy to give a merely English reader any adequate idea of the sort of changes by which Strada and his associates adapted the old hymns to modern use. But for those who can read Latin some specimens are worth giving. Take first the great sacramental hymn of the eighth or ninth century:
Ad coenam Agni providi
Et stolis albis candidi,