Page:The Mediaeval Mind Vol 2.djvu/200

188 Nevertheless the simpler metres were cultivated successfully by the best scholars of the twelfth century.

Most of the Latin poetry of the Carolingian period was metrical, if we are to judge from the mass that remains. Reminiscence of the antique enveloped educated men, with whom the mediaeval spirit had not reached distinctness of thought and feeling. So the poetry resembled the contemporary sculpture and painting, in which the antique was still unsuperseded by any new style. Following the antique metres, using antique phrase and commonplace, often copying antique sentiment, this poetry was as dull as might be expected from men who were amused by calling each other Homer, Virgil, Horace, or David. Usually the poets were ecclesiastics, and interested in theology; but many of the pieces are conventionally profane in topic, and as humanistic as the Latin poetry of Petrarch. Moreover, just as Petrarch's Latin poetry was still-born, while his Italian sonnets live, so the Carolingian poetry, when it forgets itself and falls away from metre to accentual verse, gains some degree of life. At this early period the Romance tongues were not a fit poetic vehicle, and consequently living thoughts, which with Dante and Petrarch found voice in Italian, in the ninth century began to stammer in Latin verses that were freed from the dead rules of quantity, and were already vibrant with a vital feeling for accent and rhyme.

Through the tenth century metrical composition became rougher, yet sometimes drew a certain force from its rudeness. A good example is the famous Waltarius, or Waltharilied, of Ekkehart of St. Gall, composed in the year 960 as a school exercise. The theme was a German story found in vernacular poetry. Ekkehart's hexameters have a strong Teuton flavour, and doubtless some of the vigour of his paraphrase was due to the German original.