The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory | Page 8

And
some such students, at least, will probably go on to examine the details
of the hymn-writers' method, with the result of finding more such
things as have been pointed out above.
[Sidenote: The rhythm of Bernard.]
Let us, for instance, take the rhythm of Bernard the Englishman (as he
was really, though called of Morlaix). "Jerusalem the Golden" has
made some of its merits common property, while its practical
discoverer, Archbishop Trench, has set those of the original forth with a
judicious enthusiasm which cannot be bettered.[10] The point is, how
these merits, these effects, are produced. The piece is a crucial one,
because, grotesque as its arrangement would probably have seemed to
an Augustan, its peculiarities are superadded to, not substituted for, the
requirements of classical prosody. The writer does not avail himself of
the new accentual quantification, and his other licences are but few. If
we examine the poem, however, we shall find that, besides the
abundant use of rhyme--interior as well as final--he avails himself of all
those artifices of what may be called word-music, suggesting beauty by
a running accompaniment of sound, which are the main secret of
modern verse. He is not satisfied, ample as it may seem, with his
double-rhyme harmony. He confines himself to it, indeed, in the

famous overture-couplet--
"Hora novissima, tempora pessima sunt, vigilemus! Ecce! minaciter
imminet arbiter ille supremus."
[Footnote 10: Sacred Latin Poetry (2d ed., London, 1864), p. 304. This
admirable book has not been, and from its mixture of taste and learning
is never likely to be, superseded as an introduction to, and
chrestomathy of, the subject. Indeed, if a little touch of orthodox
prudery had not made the Archbishop exclude the Stabat, hardly a
hymn of the very first class could be said to be missing in it.]
But immediately afterwards, and more or loss throughout, he redoubles
and redoubles again every possible artifice--sound-repetition in the
imminet, imminet, of the third line, alliteration in the recta remuneret of
the fourth, and everywhere trills and roulades, not limited to the
actually rhyming syllables of the same vowel--
"Tunc nova gloria pectora sobria clarificabit... Candida lilia, viva
monilia, sunt tibi Sponsa... Te peto, te colo, te flagro, te volo, canto,
saluto."
He has instinctively discovered the necessity of varying as much as
possible the cadence and composition of the last third of his verse, and
carefully avoids anything like a monotonous use of his only spondee; in
a batch of eighteen lines taken at random, there are only six end-words
of two syllables, and these only once rhyme together. The consequence
of these and other devices is that the whole poem is accompanied by a
sort of swirl and eddy of sound and cadence, constantly varying,
constantly shifting its centres and systems, but always assisting the
sense with grateful clash or murmur, according as it is loud or soft, of
word-music.
[Sidenote: Literary perfection of the Hymns.]
The vernacular languages were not as yet in case to produce anything
so complicated as this, and some of them have never been quite able to
produce it to this day. But it must be obvious at once what a standard

was held up before poets, almost every one of whom, even if he had but
small Latin in a general way, heard these hymns constantly sung, and
what means of producing like effects were suggested to them. The most
varied and charming lyric of the Middle Ages, that of the German
Minnesingers, shows the effect of this Latin practice side by side, or
rather inextricably mingled, with the effects of the preciser French and
Provençal verse-scheme, and the still looser but equally musical,
though half-inarticulate, suggestions of indigenous song. That English
prosody--the prosody of Shakespeare and Coleridge, of Shelley and
Keats--owes its origin to a similar admixture the present writer at least
has no doubt at all, while even those who deny this can hardly deny the
positive literary achievement of the best mediæval hymns. They stand
by themselves. Latin--which, despite its constant colloquial life, still
even in the Middle Ages had in profane use many of the drawbacks of a
dead language, being either slipshod or stiff,--here, owing to the
millennium and more during which it had been throughout Western
Europe the living language and the sole living language of the Church
Universal, shakes off at once all artificial and all doggerel character. It
is thoroughly alive: it comes from the writers' hearts as easily as from
their pens. They have in the fullest sense proved it; they know exactly
what they can do, and in this particular sphere there is hardly anything
that they cannot do.
[Sidenote: Scholastic Philosophy.]
The far-famed and almost more abused than famed Scholastic
Philosophy[11] cannot be said to have added to positive literature any
such