CHAPTER XXXII
EVOLUTION OF MEDIAEVAL LATIN VERSE
I. METRICAL VERSE.
II. SUBSTITUTION OF ACCENT FOR QUANTITY.
III. SEQUENCE-HYMN AND STUDENT-SONG.
IV. PASSAGE OF THEMES INTO THE VERNACULAR.
In mediaeval Latin poetry the endeavour to preserve a
classical style and the irresistible tendency to evolve new
forms are more palpably distinguishable than in the prose.
For there is a visible parting of the ways between the
retention of the antique metres and their fruitful abandonment
in verses built of accentual rhyme. Moreover, this formal
divergence corresponds to a substantial difference, inasmuch
as there was usually a larger survival of antique feeling and
allusion in the mediaeval metrical attempts than in the
rhyming poems.
As in the prose, so in the poetry, the lines of development
may be followed from the Carolingian time. But a difference
will be found between Italy and the North; for in Italy the
course was quicker, but a less organic evolution resulted in
verse less excellent and less distinctly mediaeval. By the
end of the eleventh century Latin poetry in Italy, rhyming
or metrical, seems to have drawn itself along as far as it was
destined to progress; but in the North a richer growth
culminates a century later. Indeed the most originative line
of evolution of mediaeval Latin verse would seem to have
been confined to the North, in the main if not exclusively.
The following pages offer no history of mediaeval Latin
poetry, even as the previous chapter made no attempt to
sketch the history of the prose. Their object is to point out the general lines along which the verse-forms were
developed, or were perhaps retarded. Three may be
distinguished. The first is marked by the retention of quantity
and the endeavour to preserve the ancient measures. In
the second, accent and rhyme gradually take the place of
metre within the old verse-forms. The third is that of the
Sequence, wherein the accentual rhyming hymn springs from
the chanted prose, which had superseded the chanting of the
final a of the Alleluia.
I
The lover of classical Greek and Latin poetry knows the
beautiful fitness of the ancient measures for the thought and
feeling which they enframed. If his eyes chance to fall on
some twelfth-century Latin hymn, he will be struck by its
different quality. He will quickly perceive that classic forms
would have been unsuited to the Christian and romantic
sentiment of the mediaeval period, and will realize that
some vehicle besides metrical verse would have been needed
for this thoroughly declassicized feeling, even had metrical
quantity remained a vital element of language, instead of
passing away some centuries before. Metre was but
resuscitation and convention in the time of Charlemagne. Yet it
kept its sway with scholars, and could not lack votaries so
long as classical poetry made part of the Ars grammatica
or was read for delectation. Metrical composition did not
cease throughout the Middle Ages. But it was not the true
mediaeval style, and became obviously academic as accentual
verse was perfected and made fit to carry spiritual emotion. Nevertheless the simpler metres were cultivated successfully
by the best scholars of the twelfth century.
Most of the Latin poetry of the Carolingian period was
metrical, if we are to judge from the mass that remains.
Reminiscence of the antique enveloped educated men, with
whom the mediaeval spirit had not reached distinctness of
thought and feeling. So the poetry resembled the contemporary sculpture and painting, in which the antique was
still unsuperseded by any new style. Following the antique
metres, using antique phrase and commonplace, often
copying antique sentiment, this poetry was as dull as might be
expected from men who were amused by calling each other
Homer, Virgil, Horace, or David. Usually the poets were
ecclesiastics, and interested in theology; but many of the
pieces are conventionally profane in topic, and as humanistic
as the Latin poetry of Petrarch. Moreover, just as Petrarch's
Latin poetry was still-born, while his Italian sonnets live, so
the Carolingian poetry, when it forgets itself and falls away
from metre to accentual verse, gains some degree of life. At
this early period the Romance tongues were not a fit poetic
vehicle, and consequently living thoughts, which with Dante
and Petrarch found voice in Italian, in the ninth century
began to stammer in Latin verses that were freed from the
dead rules of quantity, and were already vibrant with a vital
feeling for accent and rhyme.
Through the tenth century metrical composition became
rougher, yet sometimes drew a certain force from its rudeness.
A good example is the famous Waltarius, or Waltharilied, of
Ekkehart of St. Gall, composed in the year 960 as a school
exercise. The theme was a German story found in
vernacular poetry. Ekkehart's hexameters have a strong Teuton
flavour, and doubtless some of the vigour of his paraphrase
was due to the German original.
The metrical poems of the eleventh century have been
spoken of already, especially the more interesting ones
written in Italy. Most of the Latin poetry emanating from
that classic land was metrical, or so intended. Frequently
it tells the story of wars, or gives the Gesta of notable lives,
making a kind of versified biography. One feels as if verse
was employed as a refuge from the dead annalistic form.
This poetry was a semi-barbarizing of the antique, without
new formal or substantial elements. Italy, one may say,
never became essentially and creatively mediaeval: the
pressure of antique survival seems to have barred original
development; Italians took little part in the great mediaeval
military religious movements, the Crusades; no strikingly
new architecture arose with them; their first vernacular
poetry was an imitation or a borrowing from Provence and
France; and by far the greater part of their Latin poetry
presents an uncreative barbarizing of the antique metres.
These remarks find illustration in the principal Latin
poems composed in Italy in the twelfth century. Among
them one observes differences in skill, knowledge, and
tendency. Some of the writers made use of leonine
hexameters, others avoided the rhyme. But they were all
akin in lack of excellence and originality both in composition
and verse-form. There was the monk Donizo of Canossa,
who wrote the Vita of the great Countess Matilda; there
was William of Apulia, Norman in spirit if not in blood,
who wrote of the Norman conquests in Apulia and Sicily;
also the anonymous and barbarous De bello et excidio urbis Comensis, in which is told the destruction of Como by Milan
between 1118 and 1127; then the metrically jingling
Pisan chronicle narrating the conquest of the island of
Majorca, and beginning (like the Aeneid) with
"Arma, rates, populum vindictam coelitus octam
Scribimus, ac duros terrae pelagique labores."
We also note Peter of Ebulo, with his narrative in
laudation of the emperor Henry VI., written about 1194;
Henry of Septimella and his elegies upon the checkered
fortunes of divers great men; and lastly the more famous
Godfrey of Viterbo, of probable German blood, and notary
or scribe to three successive emperors, with his cantafable
Pantheon or Memoria saecularum. Godfrey's poetry is
rhymed after a manner of his own.
In the North, or more specifically speaking in the land
of France north of the Loire, the twelfth century brought
better metrical poetry than in Italy. Yet it had something
of the deadness of imitation, since the vis vivida of song had
passed over into rhyming verse. Still from the academic
point of view, metre was the proper vehicle of poetry; as
one sees, for instance, in the Ars versificatoria of Matthew
of Vendome, written toward the close of the twelfth century.
"Versus est metrica descriptio," says he, and then elaborates
his, for the most part borrowed, definition: "Verse is metrical
description proceeding concisely and line by line through
the comely marriage of words to flowers of thought, and
containing nothing trivial or irrelevant." A neat conception
this of poetry; and the same writer denounces leonine
rhyming as unseemly, but praises the favourite metre of
the Middle Ages, the elegiac; for he regards the hexameter
and pentameter as together forming the perfect verse. It
was in this metre that Hildebert wrote his almost classic elegy over the ruins of Rome. A few lines have been
quoted from it; but the whole poem, which is not long, is
of interest as one of the very best examples of a mediaeval
Latin elegy:
"Par tibi, Roma, nihil, cum sis prope tola ruina;
Quam magni fueris Integra fracta doces.
Longa tuos fastus aetas destruxit, et arces
Caesaris et superum templa palude jacent.
Ille labor, labor ille ruit quem dirus Araxes
Et stantem tremuit et cecidisse dolet;
Quem gladii regum, quem provida cura senatus,
Quem superi rerum constituere caput;
Quem magis optavit cum crimine solus habere
Caesar, quam socius et pius esse socer,
Qui, crescens studiis tribus, hostes, crimen, amicos
Vi domuit, secuit legibus, emit ope;
In quem, dum fieret, vigilavit cura priorum:
Juvit opus pietas hospitis, unda, locus.
Materiem, fabros, expensas axis uterque
Misit, se muris obtulit ipse locus.
Expendere duces thesauros, fata favorem,
Artifices studium, totus et orbis opes.
Urbs cecidit de qua si quicquam dicere dignum
Moliar, hoc potero dicere: Roma fuit.
Non tamen annorum series, non flamma, nec ensis
Ad plenum potuit hoc abolere decus.
Cura hominum potuit tantam componere Romam
Quantam non potuit solvere cura deum.
Confer opes marmorque novum superumque favorem,
Artificum vigilent in nova facta manus,
Non tamen aut fieri par stanti machina muro,
Aut restaurari sola ruina potest.
Tantum restat adhuc, tantum ruit, ut neque pars stans
Aequari possit, diruta nec refici.
Hic superum formas superi mirantur et ipsi,
Et cupiunt fictis vultibus esse pares.
Non potuit natura deos hoc ore creare
Quo miranda deum signa creavit homo.
Vultus adest his numinibus, potiusque coluntur
Artificum studio quam deitate sua.
Urbs felix, si vel dominis urbs illa careret,
Vel dominis esset turpe carere fide."
The elegiac metre was used by Abaelard in his didactic poem to his son Astralabius, and by John of Salisbury in
his Entheticus. The hexameter also was a favourite measure,
used, for instance, by Alanus of Lille in the Anticlaudianus,
perhaps the noblest of mediaeval narrative or allegorical
poems in Latin. Another excellent composition in
hexameter was the Alexandreis of Walter, born, like Alanus,
apparently at Lille, but commonly called of Chatillon. As
poets and as classical scholars, these two men were worthy
contemporaries. Walter's poem follows, or rather enlarges
upon the Life of Alexander by Quintus Curtius. He is
said to have written it on the challenge of Matthew of
Vendome, him of the Ars versificatoria. The Ligurinus of
a certain Cistercian Gunther is still another good example
of a long narrative poem in hexameters. It sets forth the
career of Frederick Barbarossa, and was written shortly after
the opening of the thirteenth century. Its author, like
Walter and Alanus, shows himself widely read in the
Classics.
The sapphic was a third not infrequently attempted
metre, of which the De planctu naturae of Alanus contains
examples. This work was composed in the form of the
De consolatione philosophiae of Boëthius, where lyrics alternate
with prose. The general topic was Nature's complaint over
man's disobedience to her laws. The author apostrophizes
her in the following sapphics:
"O Dei proles, genitrixque rerum,
Vinculum mundi, stabilisque nexus,
Gemma terrenis, speculum caducis,
Lucifer orbis.
Pax, amor, virtus, regimen, potestas,
Ordo, lex, finis, via, dux, origo,
Vita, lux, splendor, species, figura
Regula mundi.
Quae tuis mundum moderas habenis,
Cuncta concordi stabilita nodo
Nectis et pacis glutino maritas
Coelica terris.
Quae noys (vovs) plures recolens ideas
Singulas rerum species monetans,
Res togas formis, chlamidemque formae
Pollice formas.
Cui favet coelum, famulatur aer,
Quam colit Tellus, veneratur unda,
Cui velut mundi dominae tributum
Singula solvunt.
Quae diem nocti vicibus catenans
Cereum solis tribuis diei,
Lucido lunae speculo soporans
Nubila noctis.
Quae polum stellis variis inauras,
Aetheris nostri solium serenans
Siderum gemmis, varioque coelum
Milite complens.
Quae novis coeli faciem figuris
Protheans mutas aridumque vulgus
Aeris nostri regione donans,
Legeque stringis.
Cujus ad nutum juvenescit orbis,
Silva crispatur folii capillo,
Et tua florum tunicata veste,
Terra superbit.
Quae minas ponti sepelis, et auges,
Syncopans cursum pelagi furori
Ne soli tractum tumulare possit
Aequoris aestus."
Practically all of our examples have been taken from
works composed in the twelfth century, and in the land
comprised under the name of France. The pre-excellence
of this period will likewise appear in accentual rhyming
Latin poetry, which was more spontaneous and living than
its loftily descended relative.
II
The academic vogue of metre in the early Middle Ages
did not prevent the growth of more natural poetry. The Irish had their Gaelic poems; people of Teutonic speech had
their rough verse based on alliteration and the count of the
strong syllables. The Romance tongues emerging from the
common Latin were as yet poetically untried. But in the
proper Latin, which had become as unquantitative and
accentual as any of its vulgar forms, there was a tonic poetry
that was no longer unequipped with rhyme.
Three rhythmic elements made up this natural mode of
Latin versification: the succession of accented and unaccented
syllables; the number of syllables in a line; and that
regularly recurring sameness of sound which is called rhyme.
The source of the first of these seems obvious. Accent
having driven quantity from speech, came to supersede it in
verse, with the accented syllable taking the place of the long
syllable and the unaccented the place of the short. In the
Carolingian period accentual verse followed the old metrical
forms, with this exception: the metrical principle that one
long is equivalent to two shorts was not adopted.
Consequently the number of syllables in the successive lines of an
accentual strophe would remain the same, where in the
metrical antecedent they might have varied. This is also
sufficient to account for the second element, the observance
of regularity in the number of syllables. For this regularity
seems to follow upon the acceptance of the principle that in
rhythmic verse an accented syllable is not equal to two
unaccented ones. The query might perhaps be made why
this Latin accentual verse did not take up the principle of
regularity in the number of strong syllables in a line, like
Old High German poetry for example, where the number of
unaccented syllables, within reasonable limits, is indifferent.
A ready answer is that these Latin verses were made by
people of Latin speech who had been acquainted with
metrical forms of poetry, in which the number of syllables
might vary, but was never indifferent; for the metrical rule
was rigid that one long was equivalent to two short; and to
no more and no less. Hence the short syllables were as
fixed in number as the long.
The origin of the third element, rhyme, is in dispute.
In some instances it may have passed into Greek and Latin
verses from Syrian hymns. But on the other hand it had
long been an occasional element in Greek and Latin
rhetorical prose. Probably rhyme in Latin accentual verse
had no specific origin. It gradually became the sharpening,
defining element of such verse. Accentual Latin lent itself
so naturally to rhyme, that had not rhyme become a fixed
part of this verse, there indeed would have been a fact to
explain.
These, then, were the elements: accent, number of
syllables, and rhyme. Most interesting is the development
of verse-forms. Rhythmic Latin poetry came through the
substitution of accent for quantity, and probably had many
prototypes in the old jingles of Roman soldiers and
provincials, which so far as known were accentual, rather
than metrical. Christian accentual poetry retained those
simple forms of iambic and trochaic verse which most readily
submitted to the change from metre to accent, or perhaps
one should say, had for centuries offered themselves as
natural forms of accentual verse. Apparently the change
from metre to accent within the old forms gradually took
place between the sixth and the tenth centuries. During
this period there was slight advance in the evolution of new
verses; nor was the period creative in other respects, as
we have seen. But thereafter, as the mediaeval centuries
advanced from the basis of a mastered patristic and antique
heritage, and began to create, there followed an admirable
evolution of verse-forms: in some instances apparently
issuing from the old metrico-accentual forms, and in others
developing independently by virtue of the faculty of song
meeting the need of singing.
This factor wrought with power—the human need and
cognate faculty of song, a need and faculty stimulated in the
Middle Ages by religious sentiment and emotion. In the
fusing of melody and words into an utterance of song—at last
into a strophe—music worked potently, shaping the
composition of the lines, moulding them to rhythm, insisting upon
sonorousness in the words, promoting their assonance and
at last compelling them to rhyme so as to meet the stress,
or mark the ending, of the musical periods. Thus the
exigencies of melody helped to evoke the finished verse,
while the words reciprocating through their vocal capabilities
and through the inspiration of their meaning, aided the
evolution of the melodies. In fine, words and melody, each
quickened by the other, and each moulding the other to
itself, attained a perfected strophic unison; and mediaeval
musician-poets achieved at last the finished verses of hymns
or Sequences and student-songs.
There were two distinct lines of evolution of accentual
Latin verse in the Middle Ages; and although the faculty
of song was a moving energy in both, it worked in one of
them more visibly than in the other. Along the one line
accentual verse developed pursuant to the ancient forms,
displacing quantity with accent, and evolving rhyme. The
other line of evolution had no connection with the antique.
It began with phrases of sonorous prose, replacing inarticulate
chant. These, under the influence of music, through the
creative power of song, were by degrees transformed to
verse. The evolution of the Sequence-hymn will be the
chief illustration. With the finished accentual Latin poetry
of the twelfth century it may become impossible to tell
which line of rhythmic evolution holds the antecedent of a
given poem. In truth, this final and perfected verse may
often have a double ancestry, descending from the rhythms
which had superseded metre, and being also the child of
mediaeval melody. Yet there is no difficulty in tracing by
examples the two lines of evolution.
To illustrate the strain of verse which took its origin in
the displacement of metre by accent and rhyme, we must look
back as far as Fortunatus. He was born about the year
530 in northern Italy, but he passed his eventful life among
Franks and Thuringians. A scholar and also a poet, he
had a fair mastery of metre; yet some of his poems evince
the spirit of the coming mediaeval time both in sentiment and form. He wrote two famous hymns, one of them in the
popular trochaic tetrameter, the other in the equally simple
iambic dimeter. The first, a hymn to the Cross, begins with
the never-to-be-forgotten
"Pange, lingua, gloriosi proelium certaminis";
and has such lines as
"Crux fidelis, inter omnes arbor una nobilis
·
·
·
·
·
Dulce lignum, dulce clavo dulce pondus sustinens!"
In these the mediaeval feeling for the Cross shows itself,
and while the metre is correct, it is so facile that one may
read or sing the lines accentually. In the other hymn, also
to the Cross, assonance and rhyme foretell the coming
transformation of metre to accentual verse. Here are the
first two stanzas:
"Vexilla regis prodeunt,
Fulget crucis mysterium,
Quo carne carnis conditor
Suspensus est patibulo.
Confixa clavis viscera
Tendens manus, vestigia
Redemtionis gratia
Hic immolata est hostia."
Passing to the Carolingian epoch, some lines from a
poem celebrating the victory of Charlemagne's son Pippin
over the Avars in 796, will illustrate the popular trochaic
tetrameter which had become accentual, and already tended
to rhyme:
"Multa mala iam fecerunt ab antico tempore,
Fana dei destruxerunt atque monasteria,
Vasa aurea sacrata, argentea, fictilia."
Next we turn to a piece by the persecuted and interesting
Gottschalk, written in the latter part of the ninth century.
A young lad has asked for a poem. But how can he sing,
the exiled and imprisoned monk who might rather weep as the
Jews by the waters of Babylon? yet he will sing a hymn to the Trinity, and bewail his piteous lot before the highest
pitying Godhead. The verses have a lyric unity of mood,
and are touching with their sad refrain. Their rhyme, if not
quite pure, is abundant and catching, and their nearest
metrical affinity would be a trochaic dimeter.
"1. Ut quid iubes, pusiole,
quare mandas, filiole,
carmen dulce me cantare,
cum sim longe exul valde
intra mare?
o cur iubes canere?
"2. Magis mihi, misenile,
flere libet, puerule,
plus plorare quam cantare
carmen tale, rubes quale,
amor care.
o cor iubes canere?
"3. Mallem scias, pusillule,
ut velles tu, fratercule,
pio corde condolere
mihi atque prona mente
conlugere.
o cur iubes canere?
"4. Scis, divine tyruncule,
scis, superne clientule,
hic diu me exulare,
multa die sive nocte
tolerare.
o cur iubes canere?
"5. Scis captive plebicule
Israheli cognomine
praeceptum in Babilone
decantare extra longe
fines Iude.
o cur iubes canere?
"6. Non potuerunt utique,
nec debuerunt itaque
carmen dulce corarn gente
aliene nostri terre
resonare.
o cur iubes canere?
"7. Sed quia vis omnimode,
consodalis egregie,
canam patri filioque
simul atque procedente
ex utroque.
hoc cano ultronee.
"8. Benedictus es, domine,
pater, nate, paraclite,
deus trine, deus une,
deus summe, deus pie,
deus iuste.
hoc cano spontanee.
"9. Exul ego diuscule
hoc in mare sum, domine:
annos nempe duos fere
nosti fore, sed iam iamque
miserere,
hoc rogo humillime.
"10. Interim cum pusione
psallam ore, psallam mente,
psallam voce (psallam corde),
psallam die, psallam nocte
carmen dulce
tibi, rex piissime."
Gottschalk (and for this it is hard to love him) was one
of the initiators of the leonine hexameter, in which a syllable
in the middle of the line rhymes with the last syllable.
"Septeno Augustas decimo praeeunte Kalendas"
is the opening hexameter in his Epistle to his friend
Ratramnus. To what horrid jingle such verses could attain
may be seen from some leonine hexameter-pentameters of
two or three hundred years later, on the Fall of Troy,
beginning:
"Viribus, arte, minis, Danaum clara Troja ruinis,
Annis bis quinis fit rogus atque cinis."
Hector and Troy, and the dire wiles of the Greeks never
left the mediaeval imagination. A poem of the early tenth
century, which bade the watchers on Modena's walls be
vigilant, draws its inspiration from that unfading memory,
and for us illustrates what iambics might become when
accent had replaced quantity. The lines throughout end in
a final rhyming a.
"O tu, qui servas armis ista moenia,
Noli donnire, moneo, sed vigila.
Dum Hector vigil extitit in Troia,
Non eam cepit fraudulenta Graecia."
And from a scarcely later time, for it also is of the tenth
century, rise those verses to Roma, that old "Roma aurea et
eterna," and forever "caput mundi," sung by pilgrim bands as
their eyes caught the first gleam of tower, church, and ruin:
"O Roma nobilis, orbis et domina,
Cunctarum urbium excellentissima,
Roseo martyrum sanguine rubea,
Albis et virginum liliis Candida:
Salutem dicimus tibi per omnia,
Te benedicimus: salve per secula."
This verse, which still lifts the heart of whosoever hears
or reads it, may close our examples of mediaeval verses
descended from metrical forms. It will be noticed that
all of them are from the early mediaeval centuries; a
circumstance which may be taken as a suggestion of the
fact that by far the greater part of the earlier accentual
Latin poetry was composed in forms in which accent simply
had displaced the antique quantity.
III
We turn to that other genesis of mediaeval Latin verse,
arising not out of antique forms, but rather from the
mediaeval need and faculty of song. In the chief instance
selected for illustration, this line of evolution took its inception in the exigencies and inspiration of the Alleluia
chant or jubilation. During the celebration of the Mass, as the
Gradual ended in its last Alleluia, the choir continued chanting
the final syllable of that word in cadences of musical exultings.
The melody or cadence to which this final a of the Alleluia
was chanted, was called the sequentia. The words which
came to be substituted for its cadenced reiteration were
called the prosa. By the twelfth century the two terms
seem to have been used interchangeably. Thus arose the
prose Sequence, so plastic in its capability of being moulded
by melody to verse. Its songful qualities lay in the
sonorousness of the words and in their syllabic
correspondence with the notes of the melody to which they were
sung.
In the year 860, Norsemen sacked the cloister of
Jumièges in Normandy, and a fleeing brother carried his
precious Antiphonary far away to the safe retreat of St. Gall.
There a young monk named Notker, poring over its
contents, perceived that words had been written in the place
of the repetitions of the final a of the Alleluia. Taking the
cue, he set to work to compose more fitting words to
correspond with the notes to which this final a was sung.
So these lines of euphonious and fitting words appear to
have had their beginning in Notker's scanning of that
fugitive Antiphonary, and his devising labour. Their primary
purpose was a musical one; for they were a device—mnemotechnic,
if one will—to facilitate the chanting of
cadences previously vocalized with difficulty through the
singing of one simple vowel sound. Notker showed his
work to his master, Iso, who rejoiced at what his gifted
pupil had accomplished, and spurred him on by pointing
out that in his composition one syllable was still sometimes
repeated or drawn out through several successive notes.
One syllable to each note was the principle which Notker
now set himself to realize; and he succeeded.
He composed some fifty Sequences. In his work, as
well as in that of others after him, the device of words
began to modify and develop the melodies themselves
Sometimes Notker adapted his verbal compositions to those
cadences or melodies to which the Alleluia had long been
sung; sometimes he composed both melody and words; or,
again, he took a current melody, sacred or secular, to which
the Alleluia never had been sung, and composed words for
it, to be chanted as a Sequence. In these borrowed melodies,
as well as in those composed by Notker, the musical periods
were more developed than in the Alleluia cadences. Thus
the musical growth of the Sequences was promoted by
the use of sonorous words, while the improved melodies
in turn drew the words on to a more perfect rhythmic
ordering.
Notker died in 912. His Sequences were prose, yet
with a certain parallelism in their construction; and, even
with Notker in his later years, the words began to take on
assonances, chiefly in the vowel sound of a. Thereafter the
melodies, seizing upon the words, as it were, by the principle
of their syllabic correspondence to the notation, moulded
them to rhythm of movement and regularity of line;
while conversely with the better ordering of the words for
singing, the melodies in turn made gain and progress,
and then again reacted on the words, until after two
centuries there emerged the finished verses of an Adam of
St. Victor.
Thus these Sequences have become verse before our
eyes, and we realize that it is the very central current of
the evolution of mediaeval Latin poetry that we have been
following. How free and how spontaneous was this
evolution of the Sequence. It was the child of the Christian
Middle Ages, seeing the light in the closing years of the
ninth century, but requiring a long period of growth before it
reached the glory of its climacteric. It was born of musical
chanting, and it grew as song, never unsung or conceived of
as severable from its melody. Only as it attained its
perfected strophic forms, it necessarily made use of trochaic
and other rhythms which long before had changed from
quantity to accent and so had passed on into the verse-making habitudes of the Middle Ages. If there be any
Latin composition in virtue of origin and growth absolutely
un-antique, it is the mediaeval Sequence, which in its final
forms is so glorious a representative of the mediaeval Hymn.
And we shall also see that much popular Latin poetry,
"Carmina Burana" and student-songs, were composed in
verses and often sung to tunes taken—or parodied—from
the Sequence-hymns of the Liturgy.
There were many ways of chanting Sequences. The
musical phrases of the melodies usually were repeated once,
except at the beginning and the close; and the Sequence
would be rendered by a double choir singing antiphonally.
Ordinarily the words responded to the repetition of the
musical phrases with a parallelism of their own. The lines
(after the first) varied in length by pairs, the second and
third lines having the same number of syllables, the fourth
and fifth likewise equal to each other, but differing in
length from the second and third; and so on through the
Sequence, until the last line, which commonly stood alone
and differed in length from the preceding pairs. The
Sequence called "Nostra tuba" is a good example. Probably
it was composed by Notker, and in his later years; for it is
filled with assonances, and exhibits a regular parallelism of
structure.
"Nostra tuba
Regatur fortissime Dei dextra et preces audiat
Aura placatissima et serena; ita enim nostra
Laus erit accepta, voce si quod canimus, canat pariter et pura conscientia.
Et, ut haec possimus, omnes divina nobis semper flagitemus adesse auxilia.
·
·
·
·
·
O bone Rex, pie, juste, misericors, qui es via et janua,
Portas regni, quaesumus, nobis reseres, dimittasque facinora
Ut laudemus nomen nunc tuum atque per cuncta saecula."
Here, after the opening, the first pair has seventeen
syllables, and the next pair twenty-six. The last pair
quoted has twenty; and the final line of seventeen syllables
has no fellow. A further rhythmical advance seems reached
by the following Sequence from the abbey of St. Martial at
Limoges. It may have been written in the eleventh century.
It is given here with the first and second line of the couplets
opposite to each other, as strophe and antistrophe; and the
lines themselves are divided to show the assonances (or
rhymes) which appear to have corresponded with pauses in
the melody:
"(1) Canat omnis turba
(2a)
Fonte renata
(2b)
Laude jucunda
Spiritusque gratia
et mente perspicua
(3a)
Jam restituta
(3b)
Sicque jactura
pars est decima
coelestis illa
fuerat quae culpa
completur in laude
perdita.
divina.
(4a)
Ecce praeclara
(4b)
Enitet ampla
dies dominica
per orbis spatia,
(5a)
Exsultat in qua
(5b)
Quia destructa
plebs omnis redempta,
mors est perpetua."
A Sequence of the eleventh century will afford a final
illustration of approach to a regular strophic structure, and
of the use of the final one-syllable rhyme in a, throughout
the Sequence:
1.
"Alleluia,
Turma, proclama leta;
Laude canora,
Facta prome divina,
Jam instituta
Superna disciplina,
2
Christi sacra
Per magnalia
Es quia de morte liberata
Ut destructa
Inferni claustra
Januaque celi patefacta!
3
Jam nunc omnia
Celestia
Terrestria
Virtute gubernat eterna.
In quibus sua
Judicia
Semper equa
Dat auctoritate paterna"
As the eleventh century closed and the great twelfth
century dawned, the forces of mediaeval growth quickened
to a mightier vitality, and distinctively mediaeval creations
appeared. Our eyes, of course, are fixed upon the northern
lands, where the Sequence grew from prose to verse, and
where derivative or analogous forms of popular poetry
developed also. Up to this time, throughout mediaeval
life and thought, progress had been somewhat uncrowned
with palpable achievement. Yet the first brilliant creations
of a master-workman are the fruit of his apprentice years,
during which his progress has been as real as when his
works begin to make it visible. So it was no sudden birth of power, but rather faculties ripening through apprentice
centuries, which illumine the period opening about the year
1100. This period would carry no human teaching if
its accomplishment in institutions, in philosophy, in art
and poetry, had been a heaven-blown accident, and not the
fruit of antecedent discipline.
The poetic advance represented by the Sequences of
Adam of St. Victor may rouse our admiration for the poet's
genius, but should not blind our eyes to the continuity of
development leading to it. Adam is the final artist and his
work a veritable creation; yet his antecedents made part of
his creative faculty. The elements of his verses and the
general idea and form of the sequence were given him;—all
honour to the man's holy genius which made these into
poems. The elements referred to consisted in accentual
measures and in the two-syllabled Latin rhyme which
appears to have been finally achieved by the close of the
eleventh century. In using them Adam was no borrower,
but an artist who perforce worked in the medium of his art
Trochaic and iambic rhythms then constituted the chief
measures for accentual verse, as they had for centuries, and
do still. For, although accentual rhythms admit dactyls
and anapaests, these have not proved generally serviceable.
Likewise the inevitable progress of Latin verse had developed
assonances into rhymes; and indeed into rhymes of two
syllables, for Latin words lend themselves as readily to
rhymes of two syllables as English words to rhymes of one.
There existed also the idea and form of the Sequence,
consisting of pairs of lines which had reached assonance and
some degree of rhythm, and varied in length, pair by pair,
following the music of the melodies to which they were
sung. For the Sequence-melody did not keep to the same
recurring tune throughout, but varied from couplet to
couplet. In consequence, a Sequence by Adam of St
Victor may contain a variety of verse-forms. Moreover, a
number of the Sequences of which he may have been the
author show survivals of the old rhythmical irregularities,
and of assonance as yet unsuperseded by pure rhyme.
Before giving examples of Adam's poems, a tribute
should be paid to his great forerunner in the art of Latin
verse. Adam doubtless was familiar with the hymns of
the most brilliant intellectual luminary of the departing
generation, one Peter Abaelard, whom he may have seen
in the flesh. Those once famous love-songs, written for
Heloïse, perished (so far as we know) with the love they
sang. Another fate—and perhaps Abaelard wished it so—was
in store for the many hymns which he wrote for his
sisters in Christ, the abbess and her nuns. They still exist,
and display a richness of verse-forms scarcely equalled even
by the Sequences of Adam. In the development of Latin
verse, Abaelard is Adam's immediate predecessor; his verses
being, as it were, just one stage inferior to Adam's in
sonorousness of line, in certainty of rhythm, and in purity of
rhyme.
The "prose" Sequences were not the direct antecedents
of Abaelard's hymns. Yet both sprang from the freely
devising spirit of melody and song; and therefore those
hymns are of this free-born lineage more truly than they are
descendants of antique forms. To be sure, every possible
accentual rhythm, built as it must be of trochees, iambics,
anapaests, or dactyls, has unavoidably some antique
quantitative antecedent; because the antique measures
exhausted the possibilities of syllabic combination. Yet
antecedence is not source, and most of Abaelard's verses by
their form and spirit proclaim their genesis in the creative
exigencies of song as loudly as they disavow any antique
parentage.
For example, there may be some far echo of metrical
asclepiads in the following accentual and rhyme-harnessed
twelve-syllable verse:
"Advenit veritas, umbra praeteriit,
Post noctem claritas diei subiit,
Ad ortum rutilant superni luminis
Legis mysteria plena caliginis."
But the echo if audible is faint, and surely no antique whisper
is heard in
" Est in Rama
Vox audita
Rachel flentis
Super natos
Interfectos
Ejulantis."
Nor in
" Golias prostratus est,
Resurrexit Dominus,
Ense jugulatus est
Hostis proprio ;
Cum suis submersus est
Ille Pharao."
The variety of Abaelard's verse seems endless. One or
two further examples may or may not suggest any ante-
cedents in those older forms of accentual verse which
followed the former metres :
" Ornarunt terram germina,
Nunc caelum luminaria.
Sole, luna, stellis depingitur,
Quorum multus usus cognoscitur."
In this verse the first two lines are accentual iambic
dimeters ; while the last two begin each with two trochees,
and close apparently with two dactyls. The last form of
line is kept throughout in the following :
" Gaude virgo virginum gloria,
Matrum decus et mater, jubila,
Quae commune sanctorum omnium
Meruisti conferre gaudium."
Next come some simple five-syllable lines, with a catch-
ing rhyme :
" Lignum amaras
Indulcat aquas
Eis immissum.
Omnes agones
Sunt sanctis dulces
Per crucifixum." Page:The Mediaeval Mind Vol 2.djvu/221 Page:The Mediaeval Mind Vol 2.djvu/222 Page:The Mediaeval Mind Vol 2.djvu/223 Page:The Mediaeval Mind Vol 2.djvu/224 Page:The Mediaeval Mind Vol 2.djvu/225 Page:The Mediaeval Mind Vol 2.djvu/226 Page:The Mediaeval Mind Vol 2.djvu/227 Page:The Mediaeval Mind Vol 2.djvu/228 Page:The Mediaeval Mind Vol 2.djvu/229 Page:The Mediaeval Mind Vol 2.djvu/230 Page:The Mediaeval Mind Vol 2.djvu/231 the entire contents of existing and progressive Christian and antique culture were contained in the mediaeval Latin literature, the literature of religion and of law and government, of education and of all serious knowledge. It was to be the primary literature of mediaeval thought; from which passed over the chief part of whatever thought and knowledge the vernacular literatures were to receive. For scholars who follow, as we have tried to, the intellectual and the deeper emotional life of the Middle Ages, the Latin literature yields the incomparably greater part of the material of our study. It has been our home country, from which we have made casual excursions into the vernacular literatures.
These existed, however, from the earliest mediaeval periods, beginning, if one may say so, in oral rather than written documents. We read that Charlemagne caused a book to be made of Germanic poems, which till then presumably had been carried in men's memories. The Hildebrandslied is supposed to have been one of them. In the Norse lands, the Eddas and the matter of the Sagas were repeated from generation to generation, long before they were written down. The habit, if not the art, of writing came with Christianity and the Latin education accompanying it. Gradually a written literature in the Teutonic languages was accumulated. Of this there was the heathen side, well represented in Anglo-Saxon and the Norse; while in Old High German the Hildebrandslied remains, heathen and savage. Thereafter, a popular and even national or rather racial poetry continued, developed, and grew large, notwithstanding the spread of Latin Christianity through Teutonic lands. Of this the Niebelungenlied and the Gudrun are great examples. But individual still famous poets, who felt and thought as Germans, were also composing sturdily in their vernacular a lack of education possibly causing them to dictate (dictieren, dichteri) rather than to write. Of these the greatest were Wolfram von Eschenbach and Walther von der Vogelweide. With them and after them, or following upon the Niebelungenlied, came a mass of secular poetry, some of which was popular and national, reflecting Germanic story, while some of it was courtly, transcribing the courtly poetry which by the twelfth century flourished in Old French.
Thus bourgeoned the secular branches of German literature. On the other hand, from the time of Christianity's introduction, the Germans felt the need to have the new religion presented to them in their own tongues. The labour of translation begins with Ulfilas, and is continued with conscientious renderings of Scripture and Latin educational treatises, and also with such epic paraphrase as the Heliand and the more elegiac poems of the Anglo-Saxon Cynewulf. Also, at least in Germany, there comes into existence a full religious literature, not stoled or mitred, but popular, non-academic, and non-liturgical; of which quantities remain in the Middle High German of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
Obviously the Romance vernacular literatures had a different commencement. The languages were Latin, simply Latin, in their inception, and never ceased to be legitimate continuations and developments of the popular or Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire. But as the speech of children, women, and unlettered people, they were not thought of as literary media. All who could write understood perfectly the better Latin from which these popular dialects were slowly differentiating themselves. And as they progressed to languages, still their life and progress lay among peoples whose ancestral tongue was the proper Latin, which all educated men and women still understood and used in the serious business of life.
But sooner or later men will talk and sing and think and compose in the speech which is closest to them. The Romance tongues became literary through this human need of natural expression. There always had been songs in the old Vulgar Latin; and such did not cease as it gradually became what one may call Romance. Moreover, the clergy might be impelled to use the popular speech in preaching to the laity, or some unlearned person might compose religious verses. Almost the oldest monument of Old French is the hymn in honour of Ste. Eulalie. Then as civilization advanced from the tenth to the twelfth century, in southern and northern France for example, and the langue d'oc and the langue d'oil became independent and developed languages, unlearned men, or men with unlearned audiences, would unavoidably set themselves to composing poetry in these tongues. In the North the chansons de geste came into existence; in the South the knightly Troubadours made love-lyrics. Somehow, these poems were written down, and there was literature for men's eyes as well as for men's ears.
In the twelfth century and the thirteenth, the audiences for Romance poetry, especially through the regions of southern and northern France, increased and became diversified. They were made up of all classes, save the brute serf, and of both sexes. The chansons de geste met the taste of the feudal barons; the Arthurian Cycle charmed the feudal dames; the coarse fabliaux pleased the bourgeoisie; and chansons of all kinds might be found diverting by various people. If the religious side was less strongly represented, it was because the closeness of the language to the clerkly and liturgical Latin left no such need of translations as was felt from the beginning among peoples of Germanic speech. Still the Gospels, especially the apocryphal, were put into Old French, and miracles de Notre Dame without number; also legends of the saints, and devout tales of many kinds.
The accentual verses of the Romance tongues had their source in the popular accentual Latin verse of the later Roman period. Their development was not unrelated to the Latin accentual verse which was superseding metrical composition in the centuries extending, one may say, from the fifth to the eleventh. Divergences between the Latin and Romance verse would be caused by the linguistic evolution through which the Romance tongues were becoming independent languages. Nor was this divergence uninfluenced by the fact that Romance poetry was popular and usually concerned with topics of this life, while Latin poetry in the most striking lines of its evolution was liturgical; and even when secular in topic tended to become learned, since it was the product of the academically educated classes. Much of
the vernacular (Romance as well as Germanic) poetry in the
Middle Ages was composed by unlearned men who had at
most but a speaking acquaintance with Latin, and knew
little of the antique literature. This was true, generally, of
the Troubadours of Provence, of the authors of the Old
French chansons de geste, and of such a courtly poet as
Chrétien de Troies; true likewise of the great German
Minnesingers, epic poets rather, Gottfried von Strassburg,
Wolfram von Eschenbach, and Walther von der Vogelweide.
On the other hand, vernacular poetry might be written
by highly learned men, of whom the towering though late
example would be Dante Alighieri. An instance somewhat
nearer to us at present is Jean Clopinel or de Meun, the
author of the second part of the Roman de la rose. His
extraordinary Voltairean production embodies all the learning
of the time; and its scholar-author was a man of genius, who
incorporated his learning and the fruit thereof very organically
in his poem.
But here, at the close of our consideration of the
mediaeval appreciation of the Classics, and the relations
between the Classics and mediaeval Latin literature, we are
not occupied with the very loose and general question of the
amount of classical learning to be found in the vernacular
literatures of western Europe. That was a casual matter
depending on the education and learning, or lack thereof, of
the author of the given piece. But it may be profitable to
glance at the passing over of antique themes of story into
mediaeval vernacular literature, and the manner of their
refashioning. This is a huge subject, but we shall not go
into it deeply, or pursue the various antique themes through
their endless propagations.
Antique stories aroused and pointed the mediaeval
imagination; they made part of the never-absent antique
influence which helped to bring the mediaeval peoples on
and evoke in them an articulate power to fashion and create
all kinds of mediaeval things. But with antique story as
with other antique material, the Middle Ages had to turn it
over and absorb it, and also had to become themselves with
power, before they could refashion the antique theme or Page:The Mediaeval Mind Vol 2.djvu/236 Page:The Mediaeval Mind Vol 2.djvu/237 Page:The Mediaeval Mind Vol 2.djvu/238 Page:The Mediaeval Mind Vol 2.djvu/239 Page:The Mediaeval Mind Vol 2.djvu/240 Page:The Mediaeval Mind Vol 2.djvu/241 The latter mediaevalized and feudalized the tale. Nor were they halted by any absurdity, or conscious of the characterlessness of the puppets of the tale.
Further to pursue the fortunes of antique themes in mediaeval literature would lead us beyond bounds. Yet mention should be made of the handling of minor narratives, as the Metamorphoses of Ovid. They were very popular, and from the twelfth century on, paraphrases or refashionings were made of many of them. These added to the old tale the interesting mediaeval element of the moral or didactic allegory. The most prodigious instance of this moralizing of Ovid was the work of Chrétien Légouais, a French Franciscan who wrote at the beginning of the fourteenth century. In some seventy thousand lines he presented the stories of the Metamorphoses, the allegories which he discovered in them, and the moral teaching of the same.
Equally interesting was the application of allegory to Ovid's Ars amatoria. The first translators treated this frivolous production as an authoritative treatise upon the art of winning love. So it was perhaps, only Ovid was amusing himself by making a parable of his youthful diversions. Mediaeval imitators changed the habits of the gilded youth of Rome to suit the society of their time. But they did more, being votaries of courtly love. Such love in the Middle Ages had its laws which were prone to deduce their lineage from Ovid's verses. But its uplifted spirit revelled in symbolism ; and tended to change to spiritual allegory whatever authority it imagined itself based upon, even though the authority were a book as dissolute, when seriously considered, as the Ars amatoria. It is strange to think of this poem as the very far off street-walking prototype of De Lorris's Roman de la rose.
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