§ 115. The Latin Hymn.
More important than the Greek hymnology is the Latin from the fourth to the sixteenth century. Smaller in compass, it surpasses it in artless simplicity and truth, and in richness, vigor, and fulness of thought, and is much more akin to the Protestant spirit. With objective churchly character it combines deej^er feeling and more subjective appropriation and experience of salvation, and hence more warmth and fervor than the Greek. It forms in these respects the transition to the Evangelical hymn, which gives the most beautiful and profound exj)ression to the personal enjoyment of the Saviour and his redeeming grace. The best Latin hymns have come through the Roman Breviary into general use, and through translations and reproductions have become naturalized in Protestant chm-ches, Tliey treat for the most part of the great facts of salvation and the fundamental doctrines of Christianity. But many of them are devoted to the praises of Mary and the martyrs, and vitiated with superstitions.
In the Latin church, as in the Greek, heretics gave a wholesome impulse to poetical activity. The two patriarchs of Latin church poetry, Hilary and Ambrose, were the champions of orthodoxy against Arianism in the "West.
The genius of Christianity exerted an influen ;e, partly liberating, partly transforming, upon the Latin language and
58C THIKI) TEKIOD. A.D. 311-590.
rersification. Poetry in its youthful vigor is like an iiupetiioui mountain torrent, which knows no bounds and breaks thrv^ugh all obstacles; but in its riper form it restrains itself and becomes truly free in self-limitation ; it assumes a symmetrical, well-regulated motion and combines it with periodical rest. This is rhythm, which came to its perfection in the poetry of Greece and Rome. But the laws of metre were an undue restraint to the new Christian spirit which required a new form. The Latin poetry of the church has a language of its own, a grammar of its own, a prosody of its own, and a beauty of its own, and in freshness, vigor, and melody even surpasses the Latin poetry of the classics. It had to cast away all the helps of the mythological fables, but drew a purer and richer inspiration from the sacred history and poetry of the Bible, and the heroic age of Christianity. But it had first to pass through a state of barbarism like the Romanic languages of the South of Europe in their transition from the old Latin. AYe observe the Latin language under the infiuence of the youthful and hopeful religion of Christ, as at the breath of a second spring, putting forth fresh blossoms and flowers and clothing itself with a new garment of beauty, old words assuming new and deeper meanings, obsolete words reviving, new words forming. In all this there is much to offend a fastidious classical taste, yet the losses are richly compensated by the gains. Christianity at its triumph in the Roman empire found the classical Latin ra})idly approaching its decay and dissolution ; in the course of time it brought out of its ashes a new creation.
The classical system of prosody was gradually loosened, and accent substituted for quantity. Rhyme, unknown to the ancients as a system or rule, was introduced in the middle or at the end of the verse, giving the song a lyrical character, and thus a closer affinity with music. For the hymns were to be sung in the churches. Thif accented and rhymed poetry was at first, indeed, very imperfect, yet much better adapted to the freedom, depth, and warmtli of the Christian spirit, than the stereotyped, stiff, and cold measure of the heathen classics. ' Arc!2bishop Trench (Sacred Latin Poetry, 2d ed Introd. p. 9) : " A struggle
§ 115. THE LATIN HYMN. 587
Quantity is a more or less arbitrary and artificial device, accent, or the empliasiziug of one syllable in a polysyllabic word, is natural and popular, and commends itself to the ear Ambrose and his followers, with happy instinct, chose for their hymns the Iambic dimeter, which is the least metrical and the most rhythmical of all the ancient metres. The tendency to euphonious rhyme went hand in hand with the accented rhythm, and this tendency appears occasionally in its crude beginnings in Hilary and Ambrose, but more fully in DamiV sus, the proper father of this improvement.
Rhyme is not the invention of either a bai baric or an overcivilized age, but appears more or less in almost all nations, languages, and grades of culture. Like rhythm it springs from the natural esthetic sense of proportion, euphony, limitation, and periodic return.' It is found here and there, even in the oldest popular poetry of republican Rome, that of Ennius, for example.' It occurs not rarely in the prose even of Cicero, and especially of St. Augustine, who delights in ingenious alliterations and verbal antitheses, \\kej)atet and latet, spes and
commenced from the first between the form and the spirit, between the old lieathen form and the new Christian spirit — the latter seeking to release itself from the shackles and restraints which the former imposed upon it ; and which were to it, not a help and a support, as the form should be, but a hindrance and a weakness — not liberty, but now rather a most galling bondage. The new wine went on fer menting in the old bottles, till it burst them asunder, though not itself to be spilt and lost in the process, but to be gathered into nobler chalices, vessels more fitted to contain it — new, even as that which was poured into them was new." This process of liberation Trench illustrates in Prudentius, who still adheres in general to the laws of prosody, but indulges the largest license.
' Comp. the excellent remarks of Trench, 1. c. p. 26 sqq., on the import of rhyme. Milton, as is well known, blinded by his predilection for the ancient classics, calls rhyme (in the preface to " Paradise Lost ") " the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame metre ; a thing of itself to all judicious ears trivial and of no true musical delight." Trench answers this biassed judgment by pointing to Milton's own rhymed odes and sonnets, " the noblest lyrics whidti EngUsh literature possesses."
' "It is a curious thing," says J. M. Neale (The Eccles. Lat. Poetry of the Middle Ages, p. 214), "that, in rejecting the foreign laws in which Latin had s<l lOng gloried, the Christian poets were in fact merely reviving, in an inspired form, the early melodies of republican Rome ; — the rhythmical ballads which were tht ielight of the men that warred with the Samnites, and the Volscians, and Hanni bal "