The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory | Page 7

of
Adam of St Victor, and the softer ones of St Bernard the Greater. It was
at this time that Jacopone da Todi, in the intervals of his eccentric
vernacular exercises, was inspired to write the Stabat Mater. From this
time comes that glorious descant of Bernard of Morlaix, in which, the
more its famous and very elegant English paraphrase is read beside it,
the more does the greatness and the beauty of the original appear. And
from this time comes the greatest of all hymns, and one of the greatest
of all poems, the Dies Iræ. There have been attempts--more than one of
them--to make out that the Dies Iræ is no such wonderful thing after all:
attempts which are, perhaps, the extreme examples of that cheap and
despicable paradox which thinks to escape the charge of blind docility
by the affectation of heterodox independence. The judgment of the
greatest (and not always of the most pious) men of letters of modern
times may confirm those who are uncomfortable without authority in a
different opinion. Fortunately there is not likely ever to be lack of those
who, authority or no authority, in youth and in age, after much reading
or without much, in all time of their tribulation and in all time of their
wealth, will hold these wonderful triplets, be they Thomas of Celano's
or another's, as nearly or quite the most perfect wedding of sound to
sense that they know.
[Footnote 8: A few more precise dates may be useful. St Bernard,
1091-1153; Bernard of Morlaix, exact years uncertain, but twelfth
century; Adam of St Victor, ob. cir. 1190; Jacopone da Todi, ob. 1306;
St Bonaventura, 1221-1274; Thomas of Celano, fl. c. 1226. The two
great storehouses of Latin hymn-texts are the well-known books of
Daniel, Thesaurus Hymnologicus, and Mone, Hymni Latini Medii Ævi.
And on this, as on all matters connected with hymns, the exhaustive

Dictionary of Hymnology (London, 1892) of the Rev. John Julian will
be found most valuable.]
[Sidenote: The Dies Iræ.]
It would be possible, indeed, to illustrate a complete dissertation on the
methods of expression in serious poetry from the fifty-one lines of the
Dies Iræ. Rhyme, alliteration, cadence, and adjustment of vowel and
consonant values,--all these things receive perfect expression in it, or,
at least, in the first thirteen stanzas, for the last four are a little inferior.
It is quite astonishing to reflect upon the careful art or the felicitous
accident of such a line as
"Tuba mirum spargens sonum,"
with the thud of the trochee[9] falling in each instance in a different
vowel; and still more on the continuous sequence of five stanzas, from
Judex ergo to non sit cassus, in which not a word could be displaced or
replaced by another without loss. The climax of verbal harmony,
corresponding to and expressing religious passion and religious awe, is
reached in the last--
"Quærens me sedisti lassus, Redemisti crucem passus: Tantus labor non
sit cassus!"--
where the sudden change from the dominant e sounds (except in the
rhyme foot) of the first two lines to the a's of the last is simply
miraculous, and miraculously assisted by what may be called the
internal sub-rhyme of sedisti and redemisti. This latter effect can rarely
be attempted without a jingle: there is no jingle here, only an ineffable
melody. After the Dies Iræ, no poet could say that any effect of poetry
was, as far as sound goes, unattainable, though few could have hoped to
equal it, and perhaps no one except Dante and Shakespeare has fully
done so.
[Footnote 9: Of course no one of the four is a pure classical trochee; but
all obey the trochaic rhythm.]

Beside the grace and the grandeur, the passion and the art, of this
wonderful composition, even the best remaining examples of mediæval
hymn-writing may look a little pale. It is possible for criticism, which is
not hypercriticism, to object to the pathos of the Stabat, that it is a trifle
luscious, to find fault with the rhyme-scheme of Jesu dulcis memoria,
that it is a little faint and frittered; while, of course, those who do not
like conceits and far-fetched interpretations can always quarrel with the
substance of Adam of St Victor. But those who care for merits rather
than for defects will never be weary of admiring the best of these
hymns, or of noticing and, as far as possible, understanding their
perfection. Although the language they use is old, and their subjects are
those which very competent and not at all irreligious critics have
denounced as unfavourable to poetry, the special poetical charm, as we
conceive it in modern days, is not merely present in them, but is present
in a manner of which few traces can be found in classical times.