of the seventh century is different from the
"Te diligat castus amor,
Te mens adoret sobria"
of Ambrose.[1] And the famous pilgrim chant of the tenth century, "O Roma nobilis, orbis et domina," has the strength of long-deepening emotion.[2]
These hymns have but dropped the constraint of metre. Religious passion had not yet proved its creative power, and the new verse-forms with their mighty rhyme, fit to voice the accumulated emotions of the Liturgy, were not in existence. The eleventh and twelfth centuries witnessed the strophic evolution of the Latin hymn, in which feeling, joined with art, at last perfected line and stanza and the passionate phrases filling them.[3] Yet nothing could be more orthodox than the Latin hymn throughout its course of development. Its function was liturgical. It was correct in doctrinal expressions, and followed in every way the authoritative teachings of the Church; its symbolism was derived from the works of learned doctors; and its feeling took form from the tenets of Latin Christianity. The Dies Irae and the Stabat Mater yield evidence of this.[4]
From the religious phases of mediaeval emotion, one may pass to modes of feeling which were secular and human. The antecedents were again the racial traits of the peoples who were to become mediaeval; the formative influences still are Christianity and the profane antique culture. The racial traits show clearest in vernacular compositions, some of which may carry fervent feeling, such as enkindles the Crusader's song of Hartmann von Aue:
- ↑ See Classical Heritage, p. 267, and cf. ibid. chap. ix. sec. I.
- ↑ See post, Chapter XXXII. ii.
- ↑ The account of the evolution of the hymn from the prose sequence is given post, Chapter XXXII. III.
- ↑ Further illustrations of the mediaeval emotionalizing of Latin Christianity could be made from the history of certain Christian conceptions, angels for example:—the Old and New Testaments and the Apocrypha contain the revelation of their functions; next, their natures are defined in the works of the Fathers and the Celestial Hierarchy of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. The matter is gone over at great length, and their nature and functions logically perfected, by the schoolmen of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. But, all the while, religious feeling, popular credences, and the imagination of poet and artist went on investing with beauty and loveliness these guardian spirits who carried out God's care of man. Thus angels became the realities they were felt to be.
