parallelistic form of the Hebrew poetry is entirely lost; the uncongenial Orientalism of thought and imagery will not submit to the hard involutions of the Latin: it dislocates the harmony of the verse, if verse still retains or strives after harmony, without giving its own rude strength or emphatic force. The Vulgate alone, by creating almost a new language, has naturalised the biblical thoughts and figures, which obstinately refuse to be bound in the fetters of the Latin Hexameter. The infallible poetic sentiment of mankind will still refuse the name of poetry to the prolix, though occasionally vigorous, versifications of Fortunatus, Juvencus, Sedulius, Arator, Avitus, and the rest. As to the old voyager in the vast interminable ocean, if he beheld on some dreary mass of rock a patch of brilliant green, a tuft of graceful trees, a cool rush of water, it became a paradise-a Tinian or a Juan Fernandez-and is described as one of the Elysian islands: so the curious reader, if, on traversing these endless poems, he discovers some lines more musical, some images more happily embodied in words, some finer or more tender thoughts expressed not without nature, he bursts out into rapture, and announces a deep mine of rich and forgotten poetry. The high-wrought expectations of the next visitants revenge their disappointment by exaggerating perhaps the dreariness and the barrenness. In these poems creative power there is and can be b Even M. Guizot, in his Lectures | Milton has given them, Poetry. So on Civilisation, cites passages from these too M. Ampère in his valuable Lecauthors, with praise, as it seems to me, far beyond their due. They are preMiltonic, as he asserts, in some of their thoughts, in some of their imagery, that is, they are drawn from the same sources; but what they want is, what tures. The passage which I have quoted from Dracontius the Spaniard, in the History of Christianity (iii. p. 356), still appears to me the most favourable example which has occurred in the course of my reading: and I none: invention had been a kind of sacrilege. The Hebrew poetry, in the coldest and most artificial translation, preserves something of its life and sententious vigour, its bold figures and imagery: in the many-folded shroud of the Latin poetic paraphrase it is a mummy. The Epic Poetry of Latin Christianity (I feel the abuse of the words) had done its work of paraphrase, or had nearly exhausted itself in a few centuries; but if it sunk almost into silence from the fifth to the eighth, it rose again more ambitious, and seized the office of the historian, or that which had been the sole function of the humble orator under the later empire, that of the panegyrist. Hardly a great historic event took place, hardly a great man ascended a throne or achieved fame, but some monkish versifier aspired to immortalise him with an interminable length of harsh hexameter or of elegiac verse. Charlemagne indeed was mostly reserved for later romance, and happily had his historian, Eginhard. But Louis the Pious was celebrated by Ermoldus Nigellus in a long poem in elegiac verse; the siege of Paris by the Normans was sung in hexameters by Abbo; the anonymous panegyrist endeavoured to raise the Italian Berengar into a hero; Hroswitha wrote of the deeds of the Emperor Otho; Gunther, the Ligurian, those of Barbarossa; Donizo celebrated the Countess Matilda, from whom was inseparable the great name of Gregory VII. William the Apulian described the conquests of the Normans; William of Brittany, Philip Augustus; and so in unexhausted succession to the Cardinal Poet of Coelestine V. and Boniface VIII. But from all those historical poems, who has yet struck out have toilsomely read much of that age. | and to some of the Jesuits, who are at To me they are inferior as Christian least correct, animated, harmonious. Latin Poetry to Sanazzaro or Vida, | for our admiration one passage of genuine poetry? Perhaps their great merit is their want of poetry: they can lie under no suspicion of invention, hardly of poetic embellishment: they are simply verse chronicles, as veracious as the works of the contemporary prose historians of the cloister. Nor were these inexhaustible and indefatigable writers in Latin verse content with the domain of his- Later Latin tory, or the reward of the panegyrical orator. poems, They seized and petrified, either for their amusement, or as a trial of skill, or for the solace and entertainment of their brother Monks, the old traditional German poetry, the fabulous histories, the initiatory romances, which, in their rude vernacular form and language, began to make themselves heard. What the Court or the Castle Hall listened to in the Lay or the Tale of the Wandering Minstrel, was heard in the Cloister in a Latin version. The Monks converted to their own use, perhaps supposed that they were saving from destruction, by transferring into imperishable Latin, the fleeting or expiring songs, which became the Niebelungen and the Heldenbuch. Such doubtless was the origin of the remarkable poem called Waltharius, or the Expedition of Attila, founded on the Legends of Dietrich, Siegfried, and Etzel. But even in this very curious work it is remarkable that, although the innate poetry of the subject has given more than usual animation to the monkish versifier, yet the prosaic and historic element predominates. The cloister poet labours to make that history which is pure mythic romance; the wild song is hardening into a chronicle. The epic of John of Exeter, on • De Expeditione Attila, edited by 1838. Compare Gervinus, Geschichte Fischer, Leipsic, 1780; and later by der poetischen Nat. Lit. der Deutschen, Grimm and Schmeller, Göttingen, i. p. 99 et seqq. CHAPTER IV. Christian Latin Poetry. History. WHAT did Latin Christianity add to the treasures of Latin poetry? Poetry, as in Greece, may have its distinct epochs in different forms, but it rarely, if ever, renews its youth. Hardly more than half a century contains all that is of the highest order in Latin poetryLucretius, Catullus, Virgil, Horace, the Elegiacs, Ovid. Even that noble declamatory verse, which in the best passages of Lucan, in Juvenal, and even in Claudian (this, with the philosophic and didactic poetry, Lucretius, Virgil, and the exquisite poetry of common sense and common life in Horace, the only indigenous poetry of Rome), dies feebly out in the triumph of Christianity over Heathenism, as celebrated by Prudentius in his book against Symmachus. Latin Poetry. The three earlier forms of Christian Latin poetry Christian were-I. Paraphrases of the Scripture, II. LeParaphrases. gends of Saints, and III. Hymns-with a few controversial poems, like that of S. Prosper on Pelagianism. I. In the Scriptural Poems the life and energy of the biblical annalists or poets are beaten out to pleonastic and wearisome length; the antithetic or It has done so besides in Greece, in England alone, hardly in Italy, unless Alfieri be admitted to make a third Epoch, with Dante and Petrarch, with Ariosto and Tasso. Spain has had but one, that of Lope, Cervantes, and Cal deron; Germany but one, and that a late one, of Schiller and Goethe. The most striking parallel is in India, of the vast Epics, the Mahabarata and Ramayana, of the Drama of Calidasa, of the Lyric Gita Govinda. |