Some of the hymns called “Ambrosian” (nearly 100 in number) are beyond all question by Ambrose himself, and the rest probably belong to his time or to the following century. Four, those beginning “Aeterne rerum conditor” (“Dread Framer of the earth and sky”), “Deus Creator omnium” (“Maker of all things, glorious God”), “Veni Redemptor Gentium” (“Redeemer of the nations, come”) and “Jam surgit hora tertia” (“Christ at this hour was crucified”), are quoted as works of Ambrose by Augustine. These, and others by the hand of the same master, have the qualities most valuable in hymns intended for congregational use. They are short and complete in themselves; easy, and at the same time elevated in their expression and rhythm; terse and masculine in thought and language; and (though sometimes criticized as deficient in theological precision) simple, pure and not technical in their rendering of the great facts and doctrines of Christianity, which they present in an objective and not a subjective manner. They have exercised a powerful influence, direct or indirect, upon many of the best works of the same kind in all succeeding generations. With the Ambrosian hymns are properly classed those of Hilary, and the contemporary works of Pope Damasus I. (who wrote two hymns in commemoration of saints), and of Prudentius, from whose Cathemerina (“Daily Devotions”) and Peristephana (“Crown-songs for Martyrs”), all poems of considerable, some of great length—about twenty-eight hymns, found in various Breviaries, were derived. Prudentius was a layman, a native of Saragossa, and it was in the Spanish ritual that his hymns were most largely used. In the Mozarabic Breviary almost the whole of one of his finest poems (from which most churches took one part only, beginning “Corde natus ex parentis”) was appointed to be sung between Easter and Ascension-Day, being divided into eight or nine hymns; and on some of the commemorations of Spanish saints long poems from his Peristephana were recited or sung at large. He is entitled to a high rank among Christian poets, many of the hymns taken from his works being full of fervour and sweetness, and by no means deficient in dignity or strength.
These writers were followed in the 5th and early in the 6th century by the priest Sedulius, whose reputation perhaps exceeded his merit; Elpis, a noble Roman lady (considered, by an erroneous tradition, to have been 5th and 6th centuries. the wife of the philosophic statesman Boetius); Pope Gelasius I.; and Ennodius, bishop of Pavia. Sedulius and Elpis wrote very little from which hymns could be extracted; but the small number taken from their compositions obtained wide popularity, and have since held their ground. Gelasius was of no great account as a hymn-writer; and the works of Ennodius appear to have been known only in Italy and Spain. The latter part of the 6th century produced Pope Gregory the Great and Venantius Fortunatus, an Italian poet, the friend of Gregory, and the favourite of Radegunda, queen of the Franks, who died (609) bishop of Poitiers. Eleven hymns of Gregory, and twelve or thirteen (mostly taken from longer poems) by Fortunatus, came into general use in the Italian, Gallican and British churches. Those of Gregory are in a style hardly distinguishable from the Ambrosian; those of Fortunatus are graceful, and sometimes vigorous. He does not, however, deserve the praise given to him by Dr Neale, of having struck out a new path in Latin hymnody. On the contrary, he may more justly be described as a disciple of the school of Prudentius, and as having affected the classical style, at least as much as any of his predecessors.
The poets of this primitive epoch, which closed with the 6th century, wrote in the old classical metres, and made use of a considerable variety of them—anapaestic, anacreontic, hendecasyllabic, asclepiad, hexameters and pentameters and others. Gregory and some of the Ambrosian authors occasionally wrote in sapphics; but the most frequent measure was the iambic dimeter, and, next to that, the trochaic. The full alcaic stanza does not appear to have been used for church purposes before the 16th century, though some of its elements were. In the greater number of these works, a general intention to conform to the rules of Roman prosody is manifest; but even those writers (like Prudentius) in whom that conformity was most decided allowed themselves much liberty of deviation from it. Other works, including some of the very earliest, and some of conspicuous merit, were of the kind described by Bede as not metrical but “rhythmical”—i.e. (as he explains the term “rhythm”), “modulated to the ear in imitation of different metres.” It would be more correct to call them metrical—(e.g. still trochaic or iambic, &c., but, according to new laws of syllabic quantity, depending entirely on accent, and not on the power of vowels or the position of consonants)—laws by which the future prosody of all modern European nations was to be governed. There are also, in the hymns of the primitive period (even in those of Ambrose), anticipations—irregular indeed and inconstant, but certainly not accidental—of another great innovation, destined to receive important developments, that of assonance or rhyme, in the final letters or syllables of verses. Archbishop Trench, in the introduction to his Sacred Latin Poetry, has traced the whole course of the transition from the ancient to the modern forms of versification, ascribing it to natural and necessary causes, which made such changes needful for the due development of the new forms of spiritual and intellectual life, consequent upon the conversion of the Latin-speaking nations to Christianity.
From the 6th century downwards we see this transformation making continual progress, each nation of Western Christendom adding, from time to time, to the earlier hymns in its service-books others of more recent and frequently 6th century downwards. of local origin. For these additions, the commemorations of saints, &c., as to which the devotion of one place often differed from that of another, offered especial opportunities. This process, while it promoted the development of a medieval as distinct from the primitive style, led also to much deterioration in the quality of hymns, of which, perhaps, some of the strongest examples may be found in a volume published in 1865 by the Irish Archaeological Society from a manuscript in the library of Trinity College, Dublin. It contains a number of hymns by Irish saints of the 6th, 7th and 8th centuries—in several instances fully rhymed, and in one mixing Erse and Latin barbarously together, as was not uncommon, at a much later date, in semi-vernacular hymns of other countries. The Mozarabic Breviary, and the collection of hymns used in the Anglo-Saxon churches, published in 1851 by the Surtees Society (chiefly from a Benedictine MS. In the college library of Durham, supplemented by other MSS. in the British Museum), supply many further illustrations of the same decline of taste:—such Sapphics, e.g., as the “Festum insigne prodiit coruscum” of Isidore, and the “O veneranda Trinitas laudanda” of the Anglo-Saxon books. The early medieval period, however, from the time of Gregory the Great to that of Hildebrand, was far from deficient in the production of good hymns, wherever learning flourished. Bede in England, and Paul “the Deacon”—the author of a fairly classical sapphic ode on St John the Baptist—in Italy, were successful followers of the Ambrosian and Gregorian styles. Eleven metrical hymns are attributed to Bede by Cassander; and there are also in one of Bede’s works (Collectanea et flores) two rhythmical hymns of considerable length on the Day of Judgment, with the refrains “In tremendo die” and “Attende homo,” both irregularly rhymed, and, in parts, not unworthy of comparison with the “Dies Irae.” Paulinus, patriarch of Aquileia, contemporary with Paul, wrote rhythmical trimeter iambics in a manner peculiar to himself. Theodulph, bishop of Orleans (793-835), author of the famous processional hymn for Palm Sunday in hexameters and pentameters, “Gloria, laus, et honor tibi sit, Rex Christe Redemptor” (“Glory and honour and laud be to Thee, King Christ the Redeemer”), and Hrabanus Maurus, archbishop of Mainz, the pupil of Alcuin, and the most learned theologian of his day, enriched the church with some excellent works. Among the anonymous hymns of the same period there are three of great beauty, of which the influence may be traced in most, if not all, of the “New Jerusalem” hymns of later generations, including those of Germany and Great Britain:—“Urbs beata Hierusalem” (“Blessed city, heavenly Salem”); “Alleluia piis edite laudibus” (“Alleluias sound ye in strains of holy praise”—called, from its burden, “Alleluia perenne”); and “Alleluia dulce carmen” (“Alleluia, song of sweetness”), which, being found in Anglo-Saxon hymnaries certainly older than the Conquest, cannot be of the late date assigned to it, in his Mediaeval Hymns and Sequences, by Neale. These were followed by the “Chorus novae Hierusalem” (“Ye Choirs of New Jerusalem”) of Fulbert, bishop of Chartres. This group of hymns is remarkable for an attractive union of melody, imagination, poetical colouring and faith. It represents, perhaps, the best and highest type of the middle school, between the severe Ambrosian simplicity and the florid luxuriance of later times.
Another celebrated hymn, which belongs to the first medieval period, is the “Veni Creator Spiritus” (“Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire”). The earliest recorded occasion of its use is that of a translation (898) of the relics of St Veni Creator. Marcellus, mentioned in the Annals of the Benedictine order. It has since been constantly sung throughout Western Christendom (as versions of it still are in the Church of England), as part of the appointed offices for the coronation of kings, the consecration and ordination of bishops and priests, the assembling of synods and other great ecclesiastical solemnities. It has been attributed—probably in consequence of certain corruptions in the text of Ekkehard’s Life of Notker (a work of the 13th century)—to Charlemagne. Ekkehard wrote in the Benedictine monastery Notker. of St Gall, to which Notker belonged, with full access to its records; and an ignorant interpolator, regardless of chronology, added, at some later date, the word “Great” to the name of “the emperor Charles,” wherever it was mentioned in that work. The biographer relates that Notker—a man of a gentle, contemplative nature, observant of all around him, and accustomed to find spiritual and poetical suggestions in common sights and sounds—was moved by the sound of a mill-wheel to compose his “sequence” on the Holy Spirit, “Sancti Spiritus adsit nobis gratia” (“Present with us ever be the Holy Spirit’s grace”); and that, when finished, he sent it as a present to “the emperor Charles,” who in return sent him back, “by the same messenger,” the hymn “Veni Creator,” which (says Ekkehard) the same “Spirit had inspired him to write” (“Sibi idem Spiritus inspiraverat”). If this story is to be credited—and, from its circumstantial and almost dramatic character, it has an air of truth—the author of “Veni Creator” was not Charlemagne, but his grandson the emperor Charles the Bald. Notker himself long survived that emperor, and died in 912.
The invention of “sequences” by Notker may be regarded as the beginning of the later medieval epoch of Latin hymnody. In the eucharistic service, in which (as has been stated) hymns were not generally used, it had been the practice, Sequences. except at certain seasons, to sing “laud,” or “Alleluia,” between the epistle and the gospel, and to fill up what would otherwise have been a long pause, by extending the cadence upon the two final vowels of the “Alleluia” into a protracted strain of music. It occurred to Notker that, while preserving the spirit of that part of the service, the monotony of the interval might be relieved by introducing at that point a chant of praise specially composed for the purpose. With that view he produced the peculiar species of rhythmical composition which obtained the name of “sequentia” (probably from following after the close of the “Alleluia”), and also that of “prosa,” because its structure was originally irregular and unmetrical, resembling in this respect the Greek “troparia,” and the “Te Deum,” “Benedicite” and canticles. That it was in some measure suggested by the forms of the later Greek hymnody seems probable, both from the intercourse (at that time frequent) between the Eastern and Western churches, and from the application by Ekkehard, in his biography and elsewhere (e.g. in Lyndwood’s Provinciale), of some technical terms, borrowed from the Greek terminology, to works of Notker and his school and to books containing them.
Dr Neale, in a learned dissertation prefixed to his collection of sequences from medieval Missals, and enlarged in a Latin letter to H. A. Daniel (printed in the fifth volume of Daniel’s Thesaurus hymnologicus), investigated the laws of caesura and modulation which are discoverable in these works. Those first brought into use were sent by their author to Pope Nicholas I., who authorized their use, and that of others composed after the same model by other brethren of St Gall, in all churches of the West.
Although the sequences of Notker and his school, which then rapidly passed into most German, French and British Missals, were not metrical, the art of “assonance” was much practised in them. Many of those in the Sarum and French Missals have every verse, and even every clause or division of a verse, ending with the same vowel “a”—perhaps with some reference to the terminal letter of “Alleluia.” Artifices such as these naturally led the way to the adaptation of the same kind of composition to regular metre and fully developed rhyme. Neale’s full and large collection, and the second volume of Daniel’s Thesaurus, contain numerous examples, both of the “proses,” properly so called, of the Notkerian type, and of those of the later school, which (from the religious house to which its chief writer belonged) has been called “Victorine.” Most Missals appear to have contained some of both kinds. In the majority of those from which Neale’s specimens are taken, the metrical kind largely prevailed; but in some (e.g. those of Sarum and Liége) the greater number were Notkerian.
Of the sequence on the Holy Ghost, sent by Notker (according to Ekkehard) to Charles the Bald, Neale says that it “was in use all over Europe, even in those countries, like Italy and Spain, which usually rejected sequences”; and that, “in the Missal of Palencia, the priest was ordered to hold a white dove in his hands, while intoning the first syllables, and then to let it go.” Another of the most remarkable of Notker’s sequences, beginning “Media in vita” (“In the midst of life we are in death”), is said to have been suggested to him while observing some workmen engaged in the construction of a bridge over a torrent near his monastery. Catherine Winkworth (Christian Singers of Germany, 1869) states that this was long used as a battle-song, until the custom was forbidden, on account of its being supposed to exercise a magical influence. A translation of it (“Mitten wir im Leben sind”) is one of Luther’s funeral hymns; and all but the opening sentence of that part of the burial service of the Church of England which is directed to be “said or sung” at the grave, “while the corpse is made ready to be laid into the earth,” is taken from it.
The “Golden Sequence,” “Veni, sancte Spiritus” (“Holy Spirit, Lord of Light”), is an early example of the transition of sequences from a simply rhythmical to a metrical form. Archbishop Trench, who esteemed it “the loveliest of all the hymns in the whole circle of Latin sacred poetry,” inclined to give credit to a tradition which ascribes its authorship to Robert II., king of France, son of Hugh Capet. Others have assigned to it a later date—some attributing it to Pope Innocent III., and some to Stephen Langton, archbishop of Canterbury. Many translations, in German, English and other languages, attest its merit. Berengarius of Tours, St Bernard of Clairvaux and Abelard, in the 11th century and early in the 12th, followed in the same track; and the art of the Victorine school was carried to its greatest perfection by Adam of St Victor (who died between 1173 and 1194)—“the most fertile, and” (in the concurrent judgment of Archbishop Trench and Neale) “the greatest of the Latin hymnographers of the Middle Ages.” The archbishop’s selection contains many excellent specimens of his works.