THE HYMN-WRITERS OF THE BREVIARY.
There are three principal liturgical books in use in the Roman Catholic
Church. Originally there were two: the Ritual, which contained all the
sacramental offices, and the Breviary, which contained the rest. But for
convenience the eucharistic office in its various forms now has a book
to itself called the Missal, and the other six sacraments recognized in
the Church of Rome make up the Ritual.
It is with the Breviary, however, that hymnology is especially
concerned, as it is in it that the hymns of the Church are mostly to be
found, while the sequences belong to the Missal. It contains the prayers
said in the Church’s behalf every day at the canonical hours by the
priests and the members of the religious orders. Originally there were
only three of these canonical hours, and they were based on Old
Testament usage. These were at the third, sixth, and ninth hour of the
Scriptures (nine o’clock, noon, and three in the afternoon), and in the
Western Church are called Tierce, Sext, and Nones, for that reason. The
number afterward was increased to five and then to seven. To these three
day hours were added three night hours, with two at the transition from
night to day (Prime), and from day to night (Vespers). But to get up
thrice in the night was too much for even monastic discipline, so they
said two night services together at midnight, and then they slept till
dawn. As this daily service differs in its contents according to the
seasons of the Church year, and also is adapted to the commemoration of
the saints of the Calendar, the Breviary is the most voluminous
prayer-book known to Christendom. It generally is published in four
substantial volumes, one each for the four natural seasons. It is used
in such public services as are not accompanied by a celebration of any
sacrament and in the choir service of the religious houses. In theory,
however, the Church is present even at the solitary recitation of the
hours by a secular priest; and when two say them in company they must
say them aloud.
Hymns were not in the services of the Breviary from the beginning. As
late as the sixth century there was a controversy as to admitting
anything but the words of Scripture to be sung. We find a Gallic synod
sanctioning their use, and a Spanish synod taking common ground with our
Psalm-singing Presbyterians. But in the next century even Spain, through
the Council of Toledo (A.D. 633), appeals to early precedent in behalf
of hymns, and decides that if people may use uninspired words in prayer,
they may do the same in their praises—_Sicut ergo orationes, ita et
hymnos in laudem Dei compositos nullus vestrum ulterius improbet_—which
went to the core of the question and silenced the exclusive
Psalm-singers. Twenty years later another Council of Toledo required of
candidates for orders that they should know both the Psalter and the
hymns by heart. Yet in the Roman Breviary no hymns were introduced
before the thirteenth century, when Haymo, the General of the Franciscan
Order, reformed it in 1244 with the sanction of Gregory IX. and Nicholas
III.
In the view of Roman Catholic liturgists, the Psalms set forth the
praise of God in general, while hymns are written and used with
reference to some single mystery of the faith, or the commemoration of
some saint. This harmonizes with their use in the Breviary, and their
division into hymns _de tempore_ for the festivals of the Church year,
or the days of the week, or the hours of the day; and hymns _de sanctis_
for the days of commemoration in the Church Calendar. Even when the same
hymn is used on a series of days, its conclusion is altered to give it a
special adaptation to each of these days. This classification, of
course, does not describe the whole body of the Latin hymns. Some few
even of those in the Breviary, as, for instance, the _Te Deum_, have to
be classed as psalms, and are called Canticles (_Cantica_); and many
outside it will not fit into any such definition of what a hymn is. But
it illustrates the general character and purpose of the hymns of the
Roman and other breviaries, as designed for a special temporal or
personal application by way of supplement to the Psalter.
At present the Roman Breviary, prepared with the sanction of the Council
of Trent, has driven nearly all the others out of use. But at the era of
the Reformation there was a great number of breviaries, every diocese
and religious order having a right to its own. Panzer enumerates no less
than seventy-one which were printed before 1536, some of them in several
editions.[18] Even now the Roman Breviary is supplemented by special
services in honor of the saints of each order or country, and by
services of a more general kind which are peculiar to some localities.
But in Luther’s time the endless variety in breviaries and missals
formed a striking feature of the confusion which to his mind
characterized the Church of Rome.
With the development of a more fastidious taste, through the study of
the Latin classics as literary models, there arose in the sixteenth
century, and even before the Reformation, a demand for a reformation of
the Breviary. Besides its defects of form, such as violations of Latin
grammar, the constant use of terms which grated on the ears of the
humanists, and the use of hymns in which rhyme rather added to the
offence of want of correct metre, the contents of the Breviary were
found faulty by a critical age. The selections from the Fathers to be
read by way of homily were in some cases from spurious works; and the
narratives of saints’ lives for the days dedicated to them were not
always edifying, and in some cases palpably untrue. It became a
proverbial saying that a person lied like the second nocturn office of
the Breviary, that being the service in which these legends are found.
But the badness of the Latin and the metrical faults of the hymns
counted for quite as much with the critics of that day. We hear of a
cardinal warning a young cleric not to be too constant in reading his
Breviary, if he wished to preserve his ear for correct Latinity.
As might have been expected, it was the elegant Medicean Pope Leo X. who
first put his hand to the work of reform. He selected for this purpose
Zacharia Ferreri, Bishop of Guarda-Alfieri, a man of fine Latin
scholarship and some ability as a poet. By 1525 Ferreri had the hymns
for a new Breviary ready, and published them with the promise of the
Breviary itself on the title-page.[19] Clement VII., also of the house
of Medici, was Pope when the book appeared, and he authorized the
substitution of these new hymns for the old, but did not command this.
The book is furnished with an introduction by Marino Becichemi, a
forgotten humanist, who was then professor of eloquence at Padua. It is
worth quoting as exhibiting the attitude of the Renaissance to the
earlier Christian literature. He praises Ferreri as a shining light in
every kind of science, human and divine, prosaic and poetical. He cannot
say too much of the beauty of his style, its gravity and dignity, its
purity, its spontaneity and freedom from artificiality. “That his hymns
and odes, beyond all doubt, will secure him immortality, I need not
conceal. Certainly I have read nothing in Christian poets sweeter,
purer, terser, or brighter. How brief and how copious, each in its
place—how polished! Everywhere the stream flows in full channel with
that antique Roman mode of speech, except where of full purpose it turns
in another direction.” That means how Ciceronian Ferreri’s speech,
except where he remembers that he is a Christian poet and bishop writing
for Christian worshippers. “More than once have I exhorted him that it
belonged to the duty and dignity of his episcopal (_pontificii_) office
to make public these Church hymns.”
“You know, my reader, what hymns they sing everywhere in the temples,
that they are almost all faulty, silly, full of barbarism, and composed
without reference to the number of feet or the quantity of the
syllables, so as to excite educated persons to laughter, and to bring
priests, if they are men of letters, to despise the services of the
Church. I say men of letters. As for those who are not, and who are the
gluttons of the Roman curia, or who have no wisdom, it is enough for
them to stand like dragons close by the sacred ark, or to drift about
like the clouds, to live like idle bellies, given over to the pursuit of
sleep, good living, sensual pleasures, and to gather up the money by
which they make themselves hucksters in religion and plunderers of the
Christian people and practice their deceits upon both gods and men
equally, until the vine of the Lord degenerates into a wild plant.”
The Italianized Greek would see no difference between a Tetzel and a
Ferreri. But there still were sincerely good people who relished the old
hymns better than the polished paganism of the Bishop of Guarda-Alfieri.
Ferreri’s hymns struck no root in spite of the favor of two Medicean
popes. They seem never to have reached a second edition. Their frankly
pagan vocabulary for the expression of Christian ideas seems to have
been too much for even the humanists.
Bishop Ferreri does not seem to have lived to prepare his shorter and
easier Breviary after the same elegant but unsuitable fashion as his
hymns. So Clement VII. put the preparation of a new Breviary into the
hands of another and a better man, Cardinal Francesco de Quiñonez. He
was a Spanish Franciscan, had been general of his order, and was made
Cardinal by Clement in acknowledgment of diplomatic services. He enjoyed
the confidence of the Emperor Charles V., and used it to rescue the Pope
from his detention in the Castle of San Angelo, when he was besieged
there after the taking of Rome by the Imperial troops in 1529. This is
hardly the kind of record which would lead us to look for a reformer
under the red hat of our cardinal. But, so far as the Breviary was
concerned, he proved himself too rigorous a reformer, if anything. His
work was governed by two leading principles. The first was to simplify
the services by dropping out those parts which had been added last. The
second was to use the space thus obtained to insert ampler Scripture
lessons and more Psalms, so that, as in earlier times, the Bible might
be read through once a year and the Psalter once a week. It is this last
feature which has elicited the praise of Protestant liturgists, and it
is known that the Breviary of Quiñonez furnished the basis for the
services of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, excepting, of course,
the Communion Service. But unfortunately hymnologists are not able to
join in this praise. To get the Psalms said or sung through once a week,
he dealt nearly as ruthlessly with the hymns as if he were a Seceder.
His Breviary appeared in 1535,[20] and for thirty-three years its use
was permitted to ecclesiastics in their private recitation of the hours.
It appeared in a large number of editions in different parts of Europe,
so that its use must have been extensive. But it did not pass
unchallenged. The doctors of the Sorbonne at Paris hurried into the
arena with their condemnation of it before the ink was fully dry on the
first copies. They declared it a thing unheard of to introduce into
Church use a book which was the production of a single author, and he—as
they wrongly alleged—not even a member of any religious order.
Furthermore, he had so shortened and eviscerated the legends for the
saints’ days, besides omitting many, that nobody could tell what virtues
and what miracles entitled them to commemoration. Above all he had
omitted Peter Damiani’s Little Office of the Blessed Virgin! Much better
founded was the objection to the omission of parts long established in
use, such as the antiphons and many of the hymns. Here we must side with
the Sorbonne against Quiñonez.
It was not until 1568 that the present Roman Breviary appeared. When the
Council of Trent met in its final session in 1562, the first drafts of a
reformed Breviary and Missal were transmitted to the Fathers by Pius
IV.; but they were too busy with questions of discipline to do more than
return these with their approbation. The work was published by Pius V.
in July, 1568, and its use was made obligatory upon all dioceses which
had not had a Breviary of their own in use for two hundred years
previously. This is in substance the Breviary now in use throughout the
Roman Catholic Church. It underwent, however, two further revisions.
That under Clement VIII., finished in 1602, was by a commission in which
Cardinals Bellarmine, Baronius, and Silvius Antonianus were members.
That under Urban VIII., completed in 1631, concerns us more directly,
and especially the part of it which was effected by three learned
Jesuits: Famiano Strada, Hieronimo Petrucci, and Tarquinio Galucci, who
had in their hands the revision of the hymns.
The three revisers, all of them poets of some distinction, and the first
famous for his history of the wars in the Low Countries, had to steer a
middle course in the matter of revision. None of them were radical
humanists after the fashion of Zacharia Ferreri; that fashion, indeed,
had gone out with the rise of the counter-reformation and of the great
order to which they belonged. Yet in the matter of “metre and Latinity,”
of which Ferreri boasted on his title page a hundred years before, the
revival of classical scholarship had established a standard to which the
old hymns even of the Ambrosian period did not conform. The revisers
profess their anxiety to make as few changes as possible; but Pope
Urban, in his bull _Psalmodiam sanctam_ prefixed to the book, announces
that all the hymns—except the very few which made no pretension to
metrical form—had been conformed to the laws of prosody and of the Latin
tongue, those which could not be amended in any milder way being
rewritten throughout. Bartolomeo Gavanti, a member of the Commission of
Revision, but laboring in another department, tells us that more than
nine hundred alterations were made for the sake of correct metre, with
the result of changing the first lines of more than thirty of the
ninety-six hymns the Breviary then contained; that the three by Aquinas
on the sacrament, the _Ave Maris stella_, the _Custodes hominum_, and a
very few others, were left as they were.
This, then, is the genesis of the class of hymns designated in the
collections as traceable no farther back than the Roman Breviary. Some
of them are original, being the work of Silvius Antonianus, Bellarmine,
or Urban VIII. himself, or of authors of that age whose authorship has
not been traced. But the greater part are recasts of ancient hymns to
meet the demands of the humanist standards of metre and Latinity.
It is not easy to give a merely English reader any adequate idea of the
sort of changes by which Strada and his associates adapted the old hymns
to modern use. But for those who can read Latin some specimens are worth
giving. Take first the great sacramental hymn of the eighth or ninth
century:
Ad coenam Agni providi
Et stolis albis candidi,
Post transitum maris Rubri
Christo canamus principi,
Cujus corpus sanctissimum
In ara crucis torridum,
Cruore ejus roseo
Gustando vivimus Deo
Protecti paschae vespero
A devastante angelo
Erepti de durissimo
Pharaonis imperio.
Jam pascha nostrum Christus est
Qui immolatus agnus est,
Sinceritatis azyma
Caro ejus oblata est.
O vera digna hostia
Per quam fracta sunt tartara
Redempta plebs captivata,
Reddita vitae praemia
Cum surgit Christus tumulo
Victor redit de barathro,
Tyrannum trudens vinculo,
Et reserans paradisum
Quaesumus, auctor omnium
In hoc paschali gaudio:
Ab omni mortis impetu
Tuum defende populum.
Ad regias Agni dapes
Stolis amicti candidis
Post transitum maris Rubri
Christo canamus principi:
Divina cujus charitas
Sacrum propinat sanguinem,
Almique membra corporis
Amor sacerdos immolat
Sparsum cruorem postibus
Vastator horret angelus:
Fugitque divisum mare
Merguntur hostes fluctibus.
Jam Pascha nostrum Christus est
Paschalis idem victima,
Et pura puris mentibus
Sinceritatis azyma
O vera coeli victima
Subjecta cui sunt tartara,
Soluta mortis vincula,
Recepta vitae praemia
Victor subactis inferis
Trophaea Christus explicat,
Coeloque aperto, subditum
Regem tenebrarum trahit.
Ut sis perenne mentibus
Paschale, Jesu, gaudium:
A morte dira criminum
Vitae renatos libera.
Now it is impossible to deny to the revised version merits of its own.
Not only does it use the Latin words which classic usage requires—as
_dapes_ in poetry for _coena_, _recepta_ for _reddita_, _inferis_ for
_barathro_—but it brings into clearer view the facts of the Old
Testament story which the hymn treats as typical of the Christian
passover. The (imperfect) rhyme of the original is everywhere sacrificed
to the demands of metre, which probably is no loss. But the gain is not
in simplicity, vigor, and freshness. In these the old hymn is much
superior. The last verse but one, for instance, presents in the old hymn
a distinct and living picture—the picture Luther tells us he delighted
in when a boy chorister singing the Easter songs of the Church. But in
the recast the vividness is blurred, and classic reminiscence takes the
place of the simple and direct speech the early Church made for itself
out of the Latin tongue.
Take again the first part of the dedication hymn, of which _Angulare
fundamentum_ is the conclusion:
Urbs beata Hierusalem
Dicta pacis visio
Quae construitur in coelis
Vivis ex lapidibus
Et angelis coronata
Ut sponsata comite
Nova veniens e coelo
Nuptiali thalamo
Praeparata, ut sponsata
Copulatur domino,
Plateae et muri ejus
Ex auro purissimo
Portae nitent margaritis
Adytis patentibus,
Et virtute meritorum
Illuc introducitur
Omnis, qui pro Christi nomine
Hoc in mundo premitur
Tunsionibus, pressuris
Expoliti lapides
Suis coaptantur locis
Per manum artificis,
Disponuntur permansuri
Sacris aedificiis.
Coelestis urbs Jerusalem
Beata pacis visio
Quae celsa de viventibus
Saxis ad astra tolleris,
Sponsaeque ritu cingeris
Mille angelorum millibus.
O sorte nupta prospera,
Dotata Patris gloria,
Respersa Sponsi gratia
Regina formosissima,
Christo jugata principi
Coelo corusca civitas.
Hic margaritis emicant
Patentque cunctis ostia,
Virtute namque praevia
Mortalis illuc ducitur
Amore Christi percitus
Tormenta quisquis sustinent.
Scalpri salubris ictibus
Et tunsione plurima,
Fabri polita malleo
Hanc saxa molem construunt,
Aptisque juncta nexibus
Locantur in fastidia.
Daniel in his first volume prints fifty-five of these recasts in
parallel columns with the originals, and to that we will refer our
readers for further specimens. It is gratifying to know that not all the
scholarship of that age was insensible to the qualities which the
revisers sacrificed. Henry Valesius, although only a layman and a lover
of good Latin—as his versions of the historians of the early Church
show—uttered a fierce but ineffectual protest in favor of the early and
mediaeval hymns. And the Marquis of Bute, a convert to Catholicism, who
published an English translation of the Breviary in 1879, says that the
revisers of 1602 “with deplorable taste made a series of changes in the
texts of the hymns, which has been disastrous both to the literary merit
and the historical interest of the poems.” He hopes for a further
revision which shall undo this mischief, but in other respects return to
the type furnished by the Breviary of Quiñonez.
The translations from the hymns of the Roman Breviary have been very
abundant. Those by Protestants have been due to the fact that the texts
even of ancient hymns were so much more accessible in their Breviary
version than in their original form. Among Roman Catholics, of course,
other considerations have weight; and in Mr. Edward Caswall’s _Lyra
Catholica_ and Mr. Orby Shipley’s _Annus Sanctus_ will be found some
very admirable versions. The latter book is an anthology from the Roman
Catholic translators from John Dryden to John Henry Newman.
From the Breviary text Mr. Duffield has made the following translations
of two hymns by Gregory the Great:
JAM LUCIS ORTO SIDERE.
Now with the risen star of dawn,
To God as suppliants we pray,
That he may keep us free from harm,
And guide us through an active day.
May he, restraining, guard the tongue,
Lest it be found to strive and cry,
And, lest it drink in vanities,
May he protect the wayward eye.
Let all our inmost thoughts be pure,
And heedlessness of heart be gone;
Let self-denying drink and food
Hold pride and flesh securely down,
That when the day at length is past,
And night in turn has come to men,
Through abstinence from earth, we may
Give thee the only glory then.
To God the Father be the praise,
And to his sole-begotten Son,
And to the Holy Paraclete,
Now and until all time be done.
ECCE JAM NOCTIS TENUATUR UMBRA.
Lo, now, the shadows of the night are breaking,
While in the east the rising daylight brightens,
Therefore with praises will we all adore thee,
Lord God Almighty!
How doth our God, commiserating mortals,
Drive away sorrow, offering them safety,
Since he shall give us, through paternal kindness,
Rule in the heavens!
This let the blessed Deity afford us,
Father and Son and equal Holy Spirit,
Whose through the earth be glory in all places
Ever resounding.
Also this translation of the Breviary recast of the _Urbs beata
Hierusalem_ of the seventh or eighth century:
COELESTIS URBS JERUSALEM.
O heavenly town, Jerusalem,
Thou blessed dawn of peace,
How lofty from the living rock
Thy starry walls increase,
Where thousand, thousand angels stand,
And praises never cease.
O bride, whose lot is aye serene,
The Father’s state is thine;
Thou art the ever-fairest queen
Adorned with grace divine;
United unto Christ, thy Head,
Thy heavenly form doth shine.
How softly gleam thy pearly gates
Which open wide to all,
Here virtue entered long ago,
And unto men doth call,
Who loved the Lord through mortal pain,
And fought and did not fall.
Thy beauty came by chisel stroke
And many a hammer-blow;
The workman’s hammer wrought the stone
Which buildeth thee below;
And joined with bonds of aptest skill
Thy splendid turrets glow.
Then honor unto God most high
As it was due of yore;
And thus the Father’s only Son
And Spirit we adore,
To whom be glory, power, and praise
Through ages evermore.
To these Dr. A. R. Thompson permits us to add, as a specimen of the
later hymns of the Latin Church, his translation of
CUR RELINQUIS, DEUS, COELUM.
O God, why didst thou put aside
For this vile earth thy heaven above?
Didst thou expect there would betide
Thee here the ministry of love?
That earth had honor, Lord, for thee?
Honor and love! nay, verily,
Lying in wickedness, earth knows
Not how to love thee, but thy foes.
Bethlehem proved what love for thee
This present evil world hath, when
She shut against thee cruelly
The doors left wide for other men,
And forced thee to the hovel, where—
Wide open to the winter air—
The very beasts could scarcely live;
No other shelter would she give.
Come, Jesus, from that hovel cold,
Exposed to all the winds that blow,
Chilled by discomfort manifold,
From the poor couch all wet with snow.
My all a couch for thee I make,
My heart the shelter thou shall take.
I give it all, I give my best,
That were for thee a better rest.
My heart to love thee, Lord, desires,
And, loving, proffers love’s warm kiss.
The kiss, to give which she aspires,
Honor and adoration is.
Take thou from me this honor true;
Take thou the love which is thy due;
For this, my loyal offering,
Out of my very heart I bring.
My heart, all burning with the fire
Of love to thee, would cherish thine;
But thou that love canst kindle higher,
And thou wilt rather cherish mine.
For thou art Love, and canst inflame
The hearts of them that love thy name
With thine own self, and not with wood;
Thou art the very Fire of God.
Come, then, O Fire of God, to me!
Come, Love, and never more depart!
Enter the place prepared for thee,
The shelter of my loving heart!
I’ll spread thee there a couch of rest,
And deem myself supremely blest,
If I may evermore abide
Loving, belovèd, at thy side.
While we have to treat rather of hymns than of hymn-writers in dealing
with the Roman Breviary, there is much of personal interest attaching to
the Breviary of Paris, its great rival in hymnological interest. A
slight revision of the hymns of this Breviary was effected in 1527—of
which the _Urbs Jerusalem beata_ is a type—and only with the idea of
correcting corruptions of the text. But the Roman revision of 1568-1631
affected the Gallican Church’s services very slightly. In no part of the
Roman Catholic world were the rights of the national Church guarded so
carefully as in France, until Napoleon bargained them away by the
Concordat of 1801. The French bishops and monastic orders continued to
retain their old service-books long after uniformity had been
established, under plea of unity, in other parts of the Church; and they
made such alterations in them as they thought necessary to the
edification of their people.
It was the Order of Cluny which first took steps toward the substitution
of new hymns for those whose use had been sanctioned by long tradition.
The general chapter of that branch of the great Benedictine family in
1676-78 charged Paul Rabusson and Claude de Vert with the preparation of
a new Breviary. On Rabusson, who was teaching theology in the monastery
of St. Martin des Champs in Paris, the labor chiefly fell. He applied to
Claude Santeul, a pensioner of the ecclesiastical seminary attached to
the Abbey of St. Magloire, asking him to prepare the new hymns. Claude
Santeul (_Santolius Maglorianus_) agreed to do so, and made some
progress in the work. He finished six hymns, which were inserted in the
new Breviary, and at his death (1684) he left two manuscript volumes of
unfinished hymns among his papers. But he found that his being selected
had excited the jealousy of his younger brother, Jean Santeul, a canon
of the monastery of St. Victor (_Santolius Victorinus_), who already was
recognized as the finest, but by no means the most edifying of the Latin
poets of the France of his time.
Claude gladly gave place to his brother—who was accepted by the Cluny
Fathers—in the hope that the work of writing hymns would divert him from
the pagan poetizing, which was regarded as unbecoming to his cloth. Jean
Santeul is the oddest figure in the annals of Latin hymnology, which is
saying a good deal. He is “a man of whom it is hard to speak without
falling into caricature,” Sainte-Beuve says (_Causeries de Lundi_, XII.,
20-56). He combined the talent of a poet of nature’s making with the
simplicity of a child and the vanity and wit of a genuine Frenchman. He
recalls La Fontaine by many of his traits, and, under the name of
“Theodas,” he has furnished La Bruyère with the materials for one of the
cleverest portraits in the _Caractères_ (1687). His mode of life was a
scandal to De Rance and other severe Churchmen, who were laboring for
the restoration of strict monastic discipline. His love of good living
and the charm of his society and his talk carried him off from his
monastery and his hours, sometimes for weeks together. His Latin
inscriptions, which adorned the fountains, bridges, and public monuments
of Paris, at once gave him recognition as the poet laureate and
pensioner of the _grande monarque_, and as a priest whose poetry dealt
more in the pagan deities than in any distinctively Christian
references. He was not an immoral man in any gross sense. Even as a _bon
vivant_, he does not seem to have transgressed what were recognized as
the bounds of sobriety, and his poetry is as free as was his life from
licentiousness. But he was frivolous, gay, reckless, and as worldly as
was consistent with his being a grown-up child. Everybody, even severe
and silent De Rance at La Trappe, liked him, but everybody shook his
head over the inconsistency of his life with his monastic vocation, and
none more sorrowfully than his good brother Claude at St. Magloire.
Now at last there seemed to be the opportunity to reclaim him by
occupying his mind and his art with serious subjects, and by bringing
him into edifying associations with good men. That he was not enough of
a theologian to discharge the task satisfactorily of himself, was rather
an advantage from this point of view. The eloquent and learned
Jansenist, Nicolas le Tourneux, undertook the work of coaching him. The
partnership worked reasonably well. Of course hymns produced by this
kind of division of labor, in which one took care of the sense and
another of the expression, have the defects of their method. But Le
Tourneux was as careful of the poet as of his verse. His severe eye
detected the play of Santeul’s vanity even in the work of writing hymns.
“Reflect, my dear brother,” he wrote, “that while in the visible and
militant Church one may sing the praises of God with an impure heart and
defiled lips, it will not be so in heaven. You have burnt incense in
your verse, but there was strange fire in the censer. Vanity furnishes
your motive where it ought to be charity.” He objects to Santeul’s
calling himself “the poet of Jesus Christ,” while he admits that vain
glory leads him to write hymns. “If you and I were all we ought to be,”
wrote the severe Jansenist, “we would quake with fear at having dared,
you to sing and I to preach of the holiness of God, without a right
sense of it. We shall be only too happy if He pardon our sermons and our
verses.” Perhaps the severity was needed and did good.
So Le Tourneux suggested and all but wrote the prayer in which Santeul
dedicated his hymns to our Lord: “Receive what is Thine; forgive what is
mine. Thine is whatever I have uttered that is good and holy. Mine that
I have handled Thy good things unworthily, and not from desire to please
Thee, but from an undue pride of poetry, of which I am ashamed. Thou
hast given me songs to praise Thee. Give me prayers, give me tears to
wash away the stains of a life less than Christian.”
His hymns must have circulated in manuscript before their publication,
for we find De Rance in 1683 praising those in commemoration of St.
Bernard, while noticing that the old hymns, if less excellent as
literature, had a more reverential spirit. In 1685, a year in advance of
the new Breviary, Santeul published them in the first collection he made
of them.[21] Their merits made a much deeper impression than their
defects. Scholars and Churchmen alike were struck by their rhetorical
vigor, the frequent boldness of their conception, the beautiful
succession of sentiments and images, the exquisite clearness of the
sense, and not by the factitious character of their enthusiasm, as
Sainte-Beuve puts it, or the frequent monotony in the treatment of
cognate themes. The Breviary, in fact, had ceased to be the voice of the
Christian congregation. The supersession of Latin by the national
languages of Western Europe had made it the prayer-book of a class
educated to relish only the classic forms of Latin verse, and to regard
the simplicity of the early hymn-writers as barbarous. Santeul wrote for
priests whose tastes had been formed on Horace and Virgil, and he
brought into these rigid forms as much of genuine Christian feeling and
doctrine as the age required. He was all the happier in these respects,
as Le Tourneux, who himself contributed to the new Breviary, was of that
Jansenist school in which religion, belittled by the pettiness and the
casuistry of the Jesuits, once more presented itself in its grandeur and
its severity.
The excellence of Santeul’s hymns at once created a demand for their
introduction in other churches and dioceses, and for his services as a
hymn-writer. Several of the best were introduced by Archbishop Harlay
into the later editions of his revised Paris Breviary, which had
appeared in 1680. So the bishops of many other French dioceses—Rouen,
Sens, Narbonne, Massillon of Clermont, and others—adopted his hymns into
their breviaries after his death. And as he gallantly said, he had the
pleasure while still living of hearing them “sung by the angels at Port
Royal.” Other orders begged him to commemorate their founders and their
especial saints; dioceses and churches in other parts of France invoked
his good offices. Hence it is that of his two hundred and twenty-eight
hymns not one in five is occupied with the great festivals of the Church
year, but are specific or general hymns to the honor of the saints,
martyrs, and doctors of the Church of France especially.
The rush of popularity—not unaccompanied by solid rewards, for the good
fathers of the Cluny Order gave him a pension—seems to have turned
Santeul’s not very well-balanced head. Le Tourneux’s admonitions were
forgotten. He ran from church to church to hear his hymns sung, and
scandalized congregations by his demonstrations of delight or disgust as
the music was appropriate or otherwise; he declaimed them in all sorts
of places, suitable and unsuitable, to extort the admiration he loved so
dearly. He did not forget to tell that even the severe De Rance had
written from La Trappe to thank him for his hymn on St. Bernard, but
that for his own part he valued the general hymn on the Doctors of the
Church above any other. Naturally he had little good to say of the hymns
his were to displace. If anything could make a pagan of him, it would be
the bad grammar of those old monkish poets, who sacrificed sense and
grammar alike to their stupid rhymes. And so he would run on by the hour
to anybody who would listen, with an egotism whose very childishness and
frankness made it inoffensive.
Of course he claimed the distinction of being the best Latin poet in
France. French poetry he despised, as being written in a language
incapable of the terse elegance of Latin. But in Latin verse he would
hear of no rival. Du Périer, who had quite as much vanity, with only a
fraction of his genius, challenged his pretensions. The two poets wrote
verses on the same theme, and then set out to find an arbiter. The first
friend to whom they appealed was Ménage, who evaded the responsibility
by declaring them equally excellent. The next they met was Racine. He
first got possession of the stakes and deposited them in the poor’s box
at the door of a church near by, and then gave the poets a round
scolding for their absurd rivalry!
The hymns of Santeul are best known to English readers through _Hymns
Ancient and Modern_, which contain some very fine versions, original and
selected. Not included there is that which Sainte Beuve pronounces his
finest hymn, and for whose retention in the Breviary he pleads against
the crusaders, who in the name of antiquity insist on replacing Santeul
and Coffin by Strada and Galucci. Out of respect for the greatest of
modern critics, we reprint it, with a translation from the pen of Dr. A.
R. Thompson. It commemorates the Presentation of our Lord in the Temple.
Stupete gentes, fit Deus hostia:
Se sponte legi Legifer obligat:
Orbis Redemptor nunc redemptus:
Seque piat sine labe mater.
De more matrum, Virgo puerpera
Templo statutos abstinuit dies.
Intrare sanctam quid pavebas,
Facta Dei prius ipsa templum?
Ara sub una se vovit hostia
Triplex: honorem virgineum immolat
Virgo sacerdos, parva mollis
Membra puer, seniorque vitam.
Eheu! quot enses transadigent tuum
Pectus! quot altis nata doloribus,
O Virgo! Quem gestas, cruentam
Imbuet hic sacer Agnus aram.
Christus futuro, corpus adhuc tener,
Praeludit insons victima funeri:
Crescet; profuso vir cruore,
Omne scelus moriens piabit.
Sit summa Patri, summaque Filio,
Sanctoque compar gloria Flamini:
Sanctae litemus Trinitati
Perpetuo pia corda cultu.
Wonder, ye nations! divine is the sacrifice.
Lo, his own law the Lawgiver obeys!
Now the Redeemer redeemed is, and purifies
Herself the mother pure. Look with amaze!
All the days set by the law for a mother,
She from the temple of God hath delayed.
Why should she stay without, as might another,
She who the temple of God hath been made?
At the one altar threefold is the sacrifice.
Mother, who offers her pure virgin heart;
Babe, his fair body that in her fond arms lies;
Aged saint, life, ready now to depart.
Oh but what sword through her heart shall be going!
Oh to what sorrow is born her fair child!
Over what altar his blood will be flowing!
He whom she bears, the Lamb holy and mild.
Christ, in his infantile body so tender,
Spotless in purity, here hath foreshown,
Sign of the sacrifice he shall yet render,
Dying the sin of the world to atone.
Now to the Father in glory supernal,
Now to the Son, and the Spirit above,
Now to the Triune, all holy, eternal,
Worship be ever in faith and in love!
As a poet Santeul fell from grace in 1689, when he fell back on his
pagan divinities in a poem addressed to the keeper of the royal gardens.
Bossuet made a great ado over it, but Fénelon and others judged him more
gently. Next year he goes to see La Trappe, and writes a fine poem on
Holy Solitude (_Sancta Solitudo_), which extorted fresh praise from De
Rance, and afterward from Sainte-Beuve. But four years later he got into
the worst scrape of his life by a flattering epitaph on the great
Arnauld, who died in 1694. Santeul always had been more or less
associated with the Jansenist party, a fact which was not forgotten when
his hymns were expelled from the churches of France in our own century.
There is preserved an account of a visit he paid to Port Royal, in which
he chattered to the nuns with equal freedom of his own hymns and of
their virtues. But he was not of the stuff of which martyrs are made.
The Jesuits had the king’s ear, and he was a pensioner of the king’s
bounty. They assailed him for his eulogy of the arch-Jansenist, and
threatened him with the disfavor of Louis XIV.; and he hastened to make
amends in a poetical epistle, of which he made two copies. By the adroit
change of the tense of a single word he made the copy for the Jesuits
retract his praises of his great friend, while that for the general
public did nothing of the sort. As a consequence he came off with no
credit on either side. Both Jesuits and Jansenists resented his
duplicity, and a fine shower of squibs and pamphlets fell on him from
both the hostile forces, until he was forced to cry for quarter, and
Bourdaloue made his peace.
He died in 1697 in Burgundy, whither he had accompanied the younger
Condé to the meeting of the Estates. St. Simon has told a very
unpleasant story of the cause of his death. He ascribes it to Condé’s
having made him drink a bowl of wine into which he had emptied his
snuff-box, “just to see what would come of it.” But the prince of
scandalmongers has been disproven on this point. Santeul’s death was due
to no such cause, but to an inflammation of the bowels and to the
malpractice of his doctors, who gave him emetics under the false
impression that he was suffering from a surfeit. He made a good end,
dying with resignation, and begging pardon for the scandal his life had
caused.
His hymns were not without their critics in his own age. Jean Baptiste
Thiers, a parish priest of great learning and bad temper, assailed the
Breviary of Cluny (in his _Commentarii de novo Breviario Cluniacensi_,
Brussels, 1702), and did not spare Santeul’s hymns, which he declared to
be much inferior to those which had come down from the earlier days of
the Church. He declared that Santeul had a greater abundance of words
than of sense, that he had almost no powers of thought, and that some of
his images, such as that in which he wreathes a garland of stones for
the martyr Stephen, were simply ridiculous. He was answered not by
Rabusson, but by his associate, Claude de Vert, after what fashion I do
not know.
It was in 1736 that the Breviary of the Diocese of Paris was published
in its third and final revision by a commission of three ecclesiastics:
François-Antoine Vigier, François-Philippe Mesengui, and Charles Coffin.
It is a significant fact that the second belonged to that Jansenist
party in the Church which the relentless efforts of the Pope, the
hierarchy, and the kings of France had not been able to exterminate.
Archbishop de Vintimille was as eager to accomplish that as his
predecessors had been, and he was ably seconded by that pious and
orthodox prince, Louis XV. But this revision, like that of 1670-80, was
a concession to the historical criticism which the Jansenists had
brought to bear upon the Church books both as to the legends of the
saints and the extravagances of the growing devotion to the Mother of
our Lord. Mesengui had been dismissed from the post Coffin had given him
in the University of Paris for his opposition to the bull _Unigenitus_,
which condemned Quesnel’s Jansenist _Reflections on the New Testament_.
Coffin’s sympathies lay in the same direction.
Charles Coffin is the man of the three who chiefly concerns us here.
Born at Buzancy, hard by Rheims, in 1676, he very early distinguished
himself as a Latin poet and an educator. He graduated at Paris in 1701,
and became a teacher in the College of Dormans-Beauvais, and then its
principal in 1713. Five years later he was chosen to succeed Rollin as
Rector of the University of Paris. He at once showed his force of
character by revolutionizing the relation of the university to the
public through abolishing the fees exacted of the students. To replace
them he extended and developed the system of posts and messages, which
the university had established in the thirteenth century and which
coexisted with the post-office system of the government, of which it was
the forerunner. He devoted its revenues to the support of the colleges.
He must have been a character of great administrative capacity, as his
plans had entire success, and probably did much to foster the
development of the post-office system of France. After remaining rector
for three years, he went back to his place at the head of the
Dormans-Beauvais College, and remained there till his death.
It was in 1727 that Charles Coffin published his first volume of Latin
poetry. The most notable piece in the collection was a fine ode in
praise of Champagne. So much were the people of the Champagne country
pleased with it, that they sent him a hamper of every vintage as long as
he lived, which was twenty-two years. He also had a hand in carrying
Cardinal de Polignac’s great poem, _Anti-Lucretius_, to the state of
completeness in which it was given to the public in 1745, three years
after its author’s death. He undertook the work of revising the old
hymns and preparing new with great reluctance, yielding only to the
entreaties of the archbishop.
It was in 1736 that the Breviary Commission finished their labors and
the archbishop gave to the diocese the new Breviary, which was adopted
by more than fifty French dioceses. Its general character does not
concern us here. It is with its hymns alone we have to do. About seventy
of the primitive and mediaeval hymns still held their place in the
Breviary of 1680, nearly half of them the work of Ambrose and his
school. The revisers spared very few of these. Only twenty-one hymns of
the earlier period were left, while eighty-five of Jean Santeul’s,
nearly a hundred by Coffin himself—including some recasts of old
hymns—and ninety-seven by other authors, chiefly Frenchmen of later
date, were inserted. There were eleven by Guillaume de la Brunetière, a
friend of Bossuet’s; six each by Claude Santeul, Nicolas le Tourneux,
and Sebastian Besnault, a priest of Sens; five by Isaac Habert, Bishop
of Vabres; four by the Jesuit Jean Commire; two each by the Jesuit
Francis Guyet and Simon Gourdan of the Abbey of St. Victor; one each by
Marc Antoine Muretus, Denis Petau, and Guillaume du Plessis de Geste;
one (or three) by M. Combault, a young friend of Charles Coffin’s. This
was modernism with a vengeance! New hymns were nearly thirteen to one in
proportion to those from the great storehouse of the ages before the
Reformation. It is not wonderful that so extreme a policy called forth a
reaction as soon as the Romanticist movement, with its juster
appreciation of the Middle Ages, had reached France. But by the end of
the eighteenth century the old Latin hymns were banished practically
from France.
As compared with Jean Santeul, Charles Coffin displays much less poetic
audacity than his predecessor. You do not feel that poetry filled the
same place in his intellectual existence, or that he was under the same
necessity to write it. He has less genius, but a great talent for verse.
And—what the critics of that age valued the most—he was more correct in
his handling of the vocabulary and the metre of Latin versification.
Santeul found classic Latin, much as he admired it, something of a
fetter to the free movement of his genius. It was a dead language he was
trying to put intense life into—an old bottle for his new wine—and at
times the bottle burst. Just because Charles Coffin’s wine is not so
new, his inspiration not so fresh, the bottle holds out better. And then
he had the greater advantage of a closer familiarity with the ideas he
wished to embody in his hymns, and with their sources in the Scriptures,
and a more practical capacity for the application of his powers to the
object in hand. His hymns are always in place; they are hymns of the
Breviary, not brilliant poems on Breviary subjects by a poet writing for
glory. I do not say that Charles Coffin was the better man; God only
knows; and I must confess to a liking for “the gay canon of St. Victor”
which the rector of the university does not inspire in me. There is a
Burns-like humanity in him and his harmless vanities which wins our love
still, as it did that of his contemporaries. But Charles Coffin had a
certain suitableness to his work which Jean Santeul lacked. He was an
eminently dignified, respectable, and useful character, who impressed
himself upon a whole generation of young Frenchmen, many of whom rose to
eminence at the bar, in the public service, and even in the army. They
all looked back to him with great respect. I wonder if they loved him as
Mark Hopkins and George Allen are loved by those who studied under them.
And in Charles Coffin’s hymns you meet the same admirable traits as in
his public work. He is a man of enlightenment, dignity, devoutness, and
eminent usefulness, without a touch of Rabelaisian _abandon_ to remind
you of Béranger’s saying: “All we _Français_ are children of the great
François.” Of that he reminds you only in his sparkling, effervescent
ode to Champagne, in reply to Bénigne Grenan’s overpraise of Burgundy.
It was to be expected that when the advocates of liturgical uniformity
made their attack upon the Paris Breviary, beginning with Gueranger’s
_Institutions Liturgiques_ (1840-42), it was Santeul whom they
especially attacked, although not he but Coffin was responsible for its
hymnology.
Charles Coffin’s hymns have a high level of excellence, which makes it
difficult to anthologize among them. Certainly not the worst are the
four Advent hymns (_Instantis adventum Dei_; _Jordanis oras praevia_;
_Statuta decreto Dei_; and _In noctis umbra desides_); that for
Christmas (_Jam desinant suspiria_) and the Vesper hymn (_O luce qui
mortalibus_); the Passion hymn (_Opprobriis Jesu satur_); the fine
series of seven hymns for the nocturn services throughout the week,
based on the seven days of Creation; and the hymn for Epiphany (_Quae
stella sole pulchrior_). These and most of his acknowledged hymns are
known to us in the translations of Williams, Chandler, and Mant, and
several of these are in _Hymns Ancient and Modern_.
As an editor he altered and even tinkered, as well as adapted and wrote
hymns. Even Jean Santeul did not escape his hand. One of the hymns
ascribed to him in the Paris Breviary is a cento from no less than
twelve of his own hymns. From the wrath he showed when such changes were
made in his lifetime, we may infer that he would have liked this as
little as did John Wesley. And the older hymns were handled in the same
way. A good example of Charles Coffin’s method of recasting old hymns is
furnished by his version of the _Ad coenam Agni providi_, which already
has been given in its original shape and in that of the Roman Breviary.
With these the reader may compare Coffin’s revision, which will be seen
to vary very widely from the old text of the ninth century:
Forti tegente brachio,
Evasimus Rubrum mare,
Tandem durum perfidi
Jugum tyranni fregimus.
Nunc ergo laetas vindici
Grates rependamus Deo;
Agnique mensam candidis
Cingamus ornati stolis.
Hujus sacrato corpore,
Amoris igne fervidi,
Vescamur atque sanguine:
Vescendo, vivimus Deo.
Jam Pascha nostrum Christus est,
Hic agnus, haec est victima
Cruore cujus illitos
Transmittit ultor angelus.
O digna coelo victima,
Mors ipsa per quam vincitur,
Per quam refractis inferi
Praedam relaxant postibus.
Christi sepulchri faucibus
Emersus ad lucem redit;
Hostem retrudit tartaro,
Coelique pandit intima.
Da Christe, nos tecum mori
Tecum simul da surgere:
Terrena da contemnere;
Amare da coelestia.
It will be observed that while the ideas, and even to some extent the
phraseology of the old hymn are retained in the first six verses, their
order is so changed as to suggest that we have an original hymn before
us, if we do not look closely. But the last verse is altogether
different. The old poet prayed that the paschal joy might be made
unending through the deliverance of the regenerate from the death
eternal. The modern prays that we may share mystically in the death and
resurrection of Christ, and learn thereby to set our affections on
things above. Similar are his recasts of the _Salvete flores Martyrum_
of Prudentius, and the Ambrosian _Jam lucis orto sidere_.
Mr. Duffield has left only one completed version of a hymn from the
Paris Breviary, and that one whose authorship I am unable to determine.
It attracted him as one of the surprisingly few hymns in which the
comparison of the Christian life to a warfare, so frequently used by our
Lord and the Apostle Paul, is employed as a leading idea. His interest
in such hymns no doubt was first awakened by his father’s admirable and
popular one:
“Stand up, stand up for Jesus,”
suggested by the dying words of Dudley Tyng. We give both the Latin and
his English version:
Pugnate, Christi milites,
Fortes fide resistite:
Immensa promisit Deus
Pio labori praemia.
Non ille fluxas ac leves
Palmas dabit vincentibus;
Sed lucis aeternae decus,
Et pura semper gaudia.
Mentes beatas excipit
Formosa coelitum domus:
Hic turba, coelis altior,
Subjecta calcat sidera.
Caduca vobis praemia
Offert levis mundi favor:
Vultus ad astra tollite;
Hic ipse fit merces Deus.
Qui nos coronat, laus Patri,
Laus qui redemit, Filio;
Alma juvans nos gratia,
Sit par tibi laus, Spiritus.
Fight on, ye Christian soldiers,
And bravely keep the faith,
For great reward shall follow,
As God’s own promise saith.
Not palms that wave and flutter
Shall be the victor’s crown,
But grace of light eternal,
And joy of pure renown.
That blessed heavenly mansion
Shall take each happy soul;
Their throng, high raised in glory,
Shall tread the starry pole.
Earth’s honor is but failing,
Her gifts are light as air;
Lift up your eyes to heaven,
For God’s reward is there.
Praise God, who crowns the battle,
And Christ, who comes to save,
And praise the Holy Spirit,
Whose grace our spirits crave.
By kindness of Dr. A. R. Thompson we add two translations from Charles
Coffin’s hymns:
QUA STELLA SOLE PULCHRIOR.
What star is this whose glorious light
Outshines the morn,
The herald of the King new-born!
Its radiance bright,
A heavenly sign,
Streams o’er the cradle of the Babe divine.
Faith, standing with the prophets old,
Sees down the skies
The promised Star from Jacob rise.
The sign foretold
She knows full well,
And straightway seeks the wondrous spectacle.
The lustrous star gives warning fair
To all the earth,
But chiefly men of Eastern birth,
With pious care,
The warning heed,
And seeking Christ upon their journey speed.
Their eager love knows no delay;
Danger nor toil
Their purpose resolute can foil.
They haste away
From home and kind,
And country, at God’s call, the Christ to find.
O Christ our Lord, thy star of grace
Leads us to thee!
Help these dull hearts of ours to be
First at the place,
Intent to prove
To thee, O Lord, our faith and hope and love.
LABENTE JAM SOLIS.
Now with the declining sun,
Day to night is passing on.
So doth mortal life descend
Swiftly to its destined end.
From the cross, thine arms spread wide
Fold the world, O Crucified!
Help us love the cross. In thy
Dear embrace help us to die!
Glory to the Eternal One,
Glory to the only Son,
Glory to the Spirit be,
Now and through eternity.
Of the other writers of the Breviary only a few need detain us. Most of
them are poets of the conventional sort, whose verse evidences the care
taken with their education rather than their possession of any native
genius, although Jean Commire (1625-1702) was of wide reputation in his
day. Even of good Claude Santeul the best that can be said is that
several of his hymns have passed for the composition of his brother, and
that the two Trinity hymns (_Ter sancte, ter potens Deus_ and _O luce
quae tua lates_) and the three on Lazarus (_Redditum luce, Domino
vocante, Panditur saxo tumulus remoto_, and _Intrante Christo Bethanicam
domum_) deserve the honor. They make us regret the loss of these two
manuscript volumes. An unfinished translation of one of these, left by
Mr. Duffield, has been completed for us by Dr. A. R. Thompson. The
asterisk marks the transition from the one translator to the other—
O LUCE QUAE TUA LATES.
O hidden by the very light,
O ever-blessed Trinity,
Thee we confess, and thee believe,
With pious heart we long for thee!
O Holy Father of the saints,
O God of very God, the Son,
O Bond of Love, the Holy Ghost,
Who joinest all the Three in One!
That God the Father might behold
Himself, *coeval was the Son;
Also the Love that binds them both;
So, God of God, the perfect One.
Complete the Father in the Son,
The Son, the Father in complete,
And the full Spirit in them both;
The Father, Son, and Paraclete.
As is the Son, the Spirit is.
Each as the Father, verily.
The Three, One all transcendent Truth,
One all transcendent Love, the Three.
Father, and Son, and Holy Ghost
Eternally, let all adore;
Who liveth and who reigneth, God,
Ages on ages, evermore!
Next we have Nicolas le Tourneux (1640-1686), the severe Jansenist,
whose preaching drew such crowds in Paris that the King asked the
reason. “Sire,” replied Boileau, “your Majesty knows how people run
after novelty; this is a preacher who preaches the Gospel. When he
mounts the pulpit, he frightens you by his ugliness, so that you wish he
would leave it; and when he begins to speak, you are afraid that he
may.” It was his _Année Chrétienne_ which suggested the _Christian Year_
to John Keble. We have seen how he coached Jean Santeul both as to the
matter of his hymns and the right spirit for a Christian poet. But the
great preacher’s own hymns are _sermoni propriores_, “properer for a
sermon,” to borrow Lamb’s mistranslation. Verse was a fetter to him, not
a wing. His best are the Ascension hymn, _Adeste, Coelitum chori_, and
that on the Baptist, _Jussu tyranni pro fide_. The former we give in the
excellent translation of Rev. A. R. Thompson, D.D.:
ADESTE COELITUM CHORI.
Hither come, ye choirs immortal,
Singing joyful canticles!
Christ hath passed the grave’s dark portal,
With the dead no more he dwells.
All in vain doth malice station
Watchful guards the tomb before,
All in vain the faithless nation
Sets the seal upon the door.
Fruitless terror, from this prison
None have stolen him away,
But by his own strength arisen,
Victor, ends he death’s dread fray.
Prisoned, and the seal unbroken,
He can leave at will the tomb,
As at first—behold the token—
He could leave the Virgin’s womb.
When he on the tree hung dying,
Raving men, who round him stood,
“Come down from the cross,” were crying,
“Then we own thee Son of God.”
But, his Father’s will obeying
Even unto death, he dies;
Priest and Victim, ’tis the slaying
Of the world’s great Sacrifice.
Nay, the cross was not forsaken;
Dead, yet greater thing did he,
By himself, his life retaken
Proved him Son of God to be.
With thee dying, with thee rising,
Grant, O Christ, that we may be,
Earthly vanities despising,
Choosing heaven all lovingly!
Praise be to the Father given,
To the Son, our Leader. He
Calleth us with him to heaven;
Spirit, equal praise to thee!
A man of very different powers is the Abbé Sebastian Besnault, of whom
nothing is told us except that he was chaplain of the parish of St.
Maurice in Sens, and died in 1726. The six hymns ascribed to him in the
Paris Breviary are among the finest in that collection. Three are hymns
on the Circumcision (_Debilis cessent elementa legis_; _Felix dies, quam
proprio_; and _Noxium Christus simul introivit_); one is an Ascension
hymn (_Promissa, tellus, concipe gaudium_), and two are Dedication hymns
(_Ecce sedes hic Tonantis_ and _Urbs beata, vera pacis_), the latter
being a recast of the _Urbs beata Hierusalem_. Quite justly does A.
Gazier (in his thesis _De Santolii Victorini Sacris Hymnis_, Paris,
1875) say that if Besnault equalled Jean Santeul in the volume of his
hymns, he would not rank below him as a sacred poet, since he quite
equals him in his Latinity and is his superior as a spiritual writer. We
give Dr. A. R. Thompson’s version of his recast of the _Urbs beata
Hierusalem_:
URBS BEATA, VERA PACIS.
Blessed city, vision true
Of sweet peace, Jerusalem,
How majestic to the view
Rise thy lofty walls, in them
Living stones in beauty stand,
Polished, set, by God’s own hand.
Every several gate of thine
Of one pearl effulgent is,
Golden fair thy wall doth shine,
Blended lustrously with this,
And thy wall doth rest alone
Upon Christ the Corner-stone.
Thy sun is the martyred Lamb,
God thy temple. Angels vie
With the saints, a joyful psalm
Ever lifting up on high,
And the Holiest worshipping,
Holy, Holy, Holy sing.
Evermore stand open wide,
Heavenly city, all thy gates.
But, who would in thee abide,
Who thy walls to enter waits,
Must, that meed of life to win,
Agonize to conquer sin.
To the Father, to the Son,
Endless adoration be!
Spirit, binding both in One,
Endless worship unto thee!
Hallowed by thy chrism divine,
We become thy living shrine.
Along with Coffin should be named one of his friends, a young advocate
named Combault, who possessed something of the spirit and energy of Jean
Santeul. How far he contributed to the Breviary of 1736 I am unable to
say, but a well-founded tradition designates him as the author of a
splendid rhetorical hymn in commemoration of the Apostles Peter and Paul
(_Tandem laborum gloriosi Principes_), which has been much admired.
Combault died in 1785.
The whole impression which this school of hymn-writers makes upon us is
like that of the Greco-French architecture of our own age. Both reflect
the critical and useful, but somewhat exclusive spirit of the
Renaissance. Both are capable of fine effects, great structural beauty,
and a certain grandeur not of the highest order. But a Greco-French
church will not bear comparison with Notre Dame; and the hymns of
Santeul and Coffin will hardly better endure a comparison with the
Christian singers who wrote when Notre Dame was new.