But some one will still press the question, How am I to read Homer? how Sophocles? Is it not manifest, that if I read according to the spoken accent, and not according to the quantitative metre, though I may preserve myself, by decent care, from grossly violating quantity, I shall certainly fail to bring out anything that the ear of the most harshly-modulated Hottentot or Cherokee could recognise as rhythm? Now what has been said hitherto of the compatibility of accent and quantity relates only to words taken separately, or as they occur in the loose succession of unfettered speech—a purely elocutional matter: of the musical element of rhythm nothing has been said. That this must modify the singing or recitation of measured verses to a considerable extent, so as to make it different from the oratorical declamation of prose, is evident; but that there is no such incomprehensible mystery in the matter, as some people imagine, I hope I shall be able to make plain in a very few words. The poetry of the ancients differed from the mass of that now written in nothing more than in this, that it was considered as a living element of the existing music, and exercised in subjection to the laws of that divine art. Now the singing of words in music has the effect of bringing out more prominently the mass of vocal sound in the words, or what the prosodians in their technical style call quantity, while the spoken accent—unless it be identified with the musical accent or rhythmical beat—is apt to be overwhelmed altogether and superseded. That this must be the case the very nature of the thing shows; but we have a distinct testimony of an ancient musical writer to this effect, which will be useful to those who in all matters are constitutionally apt to depend more on authority than on reason.[38] This explains why, in the ancient treatises on poetical measures, we find not a word said about the spoken accent. If the full musical value of each foot, (or bar, as we call it,) in point of vowel-fulness, according to an established sequence be given, the poet is considered to have done his duty to the musician; the rhythmical beat, or musical accent, accompanies the measured succession of bars, as with us, but the spoken accent is disregarded. Of all this in our elocutional poetry we do, and must, in the nature of things, do the very reverse. Poetry composed primarily for recitation must follow the laws of spoken speech; and the spoken accent being the most prominent element in that speech, becomes of course the great regulator of poetical rhythm. Quantity, as the secondary element of spoken speech, though the principal thing in music, is not indeed neglected altogether, but left to the free disposal of the poet, so that the technical structure of his verse is in no wise bound by it. The musician then comes in, and finding that he has no liberty in the matter of the spoken accent, (the public ear being altogether formed on that,) exercises his large discretion in the matter of quantity, drawing out, without ceremony, a spoken quaver into a sung minim, or cutting short a spoken minim into a sung quaver. Now this license, familiar as it is to us, would have strangely startled, and appeared almost ludicrous to a Greek ear; and by the same effect of mere custom, we have to explain the fact, that the practice of composing poetry, without any reference to the spoken accent, practised by the ancients, appears to us so extraordinary. In our attempts to explain it, we have sometimes altogether lost out of view the fact, that music and conversational speech, though kindred arts, and arts in the ancient practice of poetry indissolubly wedded, have each their own distinctive tendencies and laws, to which full effect cannot easily be given while they act together; and every such case of joint action must accordingly be, to a certain extent—like the harmonious practice of connubial life—a compromise. My conclusion, therefore, with regard to the reading of Homer and Sophocles is, in the first place, that they were never intended to be read in our sense of the word, that they are not constructed on reading principles, and that, when we do recite them—as the ancients themselves no doubt likewise did—we must read them in a manner that makes as near an approach as possible to the musical principles on which they were constructed. With regard to the strictly lyrical parts of poetry, as Pindar and the tragic choruses, I have no hesitation in saying, that the only proper way to obtain a full perception of their rhythmical beauty, is to sing or chant them to any extemporized melody, (which would be much more readily done were not music so unworthily neglected in our higher schools;) while with regard to the dialogic parts of the drama, which were declaimed and not sung by the ancients themselves, the teacher must take care to accustom his pupils to a deep and mellow fulness of vocalization, and a deliberate stateliness of verbal procession, as much as possible the reverse of that hasty trip with which we are accustomed to read the dialogue of our dramatic poetry. The musical accent, or rhythmical beat, will, of course, in such a method of recitation, receive a marked prominence; the long quantity will never be slurred; and with regard to the spoken accent, what I say is this, the ear of the student must first be trained in reading prose never to omit the accent, and accustomed to feel, by the living iteration of the ear, that both accent and quantity are an essential part of the word. This many schoolmasters will not do, because it requires science, and will take a little trouble; but let such pass. Those who do so train the young classical ear, will find that in turning to poetry, and keeping time with their foot as they read any metre, the attentive scholar will not only readily follow the given rhythm, and appreciate the position of the musical accent, (very few human beings being altogether destitute of the rhythmical principle,) but will be able also to preserve the spoken accent in those places where the flow of the rhythm does not altogether overpower it. What I mean is this. In the line, for instance,
οὐλομένην ἣ μυρἴ Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε’ ἔθηκεν,
the second of the Iliad, the boy who has been properly trained to put the accent on the penult of οὔλομένην, preserving the long quantity of the final syllable, will, even though he retains that accent in the rhythmical declamation of the line, find no impediment to the rhythmical progress of the verse, but rather an agreeable variety, and an antidote against monotony; and though, on account of the strong effect which the rhythm always exercises on the closing word of the line, it will be difficult to give the full effect to the spoken accent on the antepenultimate of ἔθηκεν, while the closing musical accent lies on the penult, nevertheless, a person who has been accustomed always to pronounce this word in prose with its proper accent and quantity, will bring out the first syllable of the word much more distinctly than is done in the sing-song of a merely rhythmical recitation, and will not spoil the verse, but rather improve it. And if any person asks me how I prove that the ancients read Homer this way, I might content myself by giving a Scotch answer, and asking, How do you prove that they read it your way? But, in fact, there is no possibility of their having read it otherwise; for having once introduced the habit of reading compositions, constructed originally on musical, not elocutional principles, with that habit they could not but bring in as much of the element of their spoken language as was consistent with the musical principle on which the very existence of the composition, as a rhythmical work of art, depended; that is to say, they allowed the musical principle of quantitative rhythm to prevail over the elocutional principle of accent, so far only as to produce harmony, not so far as to fatigue with monotony.
The reader will observe that I am not theorizing in all this, but speaking from experience; and therefore I speak with confidence. For ten years I read the Latin poets in Aberdeen, and I found no difficulty in reading them so as to combine the living effect of both accent and quantity, and teaching the student both by the ear alone. The first line of Virgil, to take an example, in respect of accent and quantity, may be read three ways. Either
| ˏ | ˏ | |
| Árma virúmque | cānŏ | Trōjæ qui prímus ab óris |
| Or, | ||
| ˏ | ||
| . . . | cănō | Trōjáe . . . |
| Or, | ||
| ˏ | ˏ | |
| . . . | căn-ō | Trōjáe . . . |
I take notice of these two words cano and Trojǽ, only because they are the only two in which the musical accent of this line clashes with the spoken accent, the rules of which, though not marked in Latin books as in Greek, were preserved by the living tradition of the Roman Catholic Church, and the accentual Latin poetry of their Service, and are observed by our schoolmasters as faithfully (without knowing it, many of them) as they violate the accent of the Greek. Now, of these three ways of reading a Latin hexameter, the second is the only one which proceeds upon the principle of the quantitative rhythm exclusively, observing the spoken accent only where it happens to coincide with it, (as happens here in four bars of the six;) while the first, which is the vulgar English way, asserts the dominancy of the spoken accent in all the six cases; and yet, as the clash only takes place in two cases, preserves, without effort, (as I have just said with regard to Homer,) the flow of the musical rhythm. With that grossness of ear, however, which Erasmus and his learned Bear noticed in the learned of his day, they fall with respect to Latin, plump into the extreme error practised by the modern Greeks, and cannot accentuate the first syllable of cano, without lengthening it, while the final syllable of the same word is generally deprived of its natural amount of sound, a strange error for a people to make with whom Latin verse making (I shall not say with what propriety) forms so prominent a part of school-discipline; but there is no end to their absurdities, no limit to their contradictions; the fact being, as one of themselves has distinctly stated,[39] that the “composition of classical verses with them is almost entirely mechanical;” and yet they have the assurance to hold up this scholastic abortion to the admiration of the public as one of the indispensable elements in the training of that improved edition of the ancient Roman—John Bull. But to finish. The third method of recitation is, I think, the correct one. It violates neither quantity nor accent, but makes the one play with an agreeable variety over the other, as we see the iridescent colours in a gown of shot silk. I think I have now answered the question satisfactorily—How is Homer to be read? If anything remains unclear, I shall be happy to communicate personally with any person who has an ear.
Before concluding these observations, I have one or two remarks to make on modern Greek, which have a vital connexion with the state of the argument. The reader will observe that I have from the beginning spoken of Greek as a living language, having had a continuous uninterrupted existence, though under various and well-marked modifications, from the days of Cadmus and his earth-sown brood to the present hour. Now the vulgar notion is, that Romaic, as it used to be called, though the present Greeks have with a just pride, I understand, rejected the epithet, is not only a different dialect of the Greek, from that spoken by Plato and Demosthenes, but a different language altogether, in the same way that Italian and Spanish are languages formed on Latin indeed, but with an organic type altogether their own. In this view Greek becomes a dead language; and the mass of scholastic and academical men who teach it habitually as such, without any regard to its existing state, will receive a justification of which they are not slow to make use. But this vulgar notion, like many others, has grown out of pedantic prejudice, and is supported by sheer ignorance. How such a notion should have got abroad is easy enough to explain. I mentioned already, that the English scholars—who have been allowed to give the law on such subjects—have so completely disfigured the classical features of Greek speech, that when they happen to meet Greeks, or to travel in Greece and attempt conversation, they can make no more of the answer they receive, than they can of the twitter of swallows, or the language of any other bird. Again, at Oxford and Cambridge, as is well known, the majority confine themselves to a very limited range even of strictly classical Greek, so that a man may well have received high honours for working up his Æschylus and his Aristotle, and yet be quite unfit to make out the meaning of a plain modern Greek book when he sees it; but the fact is, I have good reason to believe, there is not one among a hundred of their scholars that ever saw such a thing. Thirdly, we must consider under what a system of prim classical prudery these gentlemen are often brought up. They are taught to believe, and have been taught here also in Scotland publicly, that after a certain golden age of Attic or Atticizing purity, the limits of which are very arbitrarily fixed, a race of Greek writers succeeded who “increased immensely the vocabulary of the language, while they injured its simplicity and debased its beauty;” and under the influence of this salutary fear they regard with a strong jealousy whole centuries of the most interesting and instructive authors who do not come under their arbitrary definition of “classical.” Men who think that the vocabulary of the Hellenic language should have been finally closed at the time of Polybius, and who pass a philologic interdict against any phrase or idiom introduced after that period, will not be very likely to look with peculiar favour on the prose of Perrhæbus, or the poetry of Soutzos. But by a large-minded philologist all this prudery is disregarded. He knows that grammarians can as little cause a language to be corrupted and to die, by any dainty squeamishness of theirs, as they with their meagre art can create a single word, or manufacture one verse of a poem. Looking at the language of Homer and Plato as a real historical phenomenon, and not as a mere record in grammatical books, he sees that it went on growing and putting forth fresh buds and blossoms long after nice lexicographers had declared that it ceased to possess vitality. A language lives as long as a people lives—a distinct and tangible social totality—speaking it, nor has it the power to die at any point, where grammarians may choose to draw a line, and say that its authors are no longer classical. What “classical” means is hard to say; but as a matter of fact many persons will read the Byzantine historians with much more pleasure than Xenophon’s Hellenics, and not be able to explain intelligibly why the Greek of the one should not be considered as good as the Greek of the other. Greek certainly was not a dead language in any sense at the taking of Constantinople in the year 1453. If it is dead, it has died since that date; but the facts to those who will examine them, prove that it is not dead. No doubt, under the oppressive atmosphere of Turkish and Venetian domination, the stout old tree began to droop visibly, and became encrusted with leprous scabs, and to shew livid blotches, which were not pleasant to behold; but such a strong central vitality had God planted in that noble organism, that, with the returning breeze of freedom, and the spread of intelligence since the great year 1789, the inward power of healthy life began again to act powerfully, and the Turkish and Venetian disfigurement dropt off speedily like a mere skin-disease as it was; and smooth Greek sounded glibly again, not only in the pulpit, which was the strong refuge of its prolonged vitality, but in the forum and from the throne. Those who doubt what I say in this matter, had best go to Athens and see; meanwhile, for the sake of those to whom the subject may be altogether new,—and from the general pedantic narrowness of our academical Greek I fear there may be many such—I shall set down a passage from Perrhæbus, and another from a common Greek newspaper, from which the fact will be abundantly evident that the language of Homer is not dead, but lives, and that in a state of purity, to which, considering the extraordinary duration of its literary existence—2500 years at least,—there is no parallel perhaps on the face of the globe, in Europe certainly not.
“Κατὰ τὸ 1820 διατρίβων εἰς τὴν Σπάρτην ὁ Πεῤῥαιβὸς ἐπὶ ἡγεμονίας τοῦ Πέτρου Μαυρομιχάλη, διέβη εἰς Κωνσταντινούπολιν, κἀκεῖθεν εἰς Δακίαν, Βασσαραβίαν καὶ Ὀδησσὸν, ὅπου εὗρε τὸν Ἀλέξανδρον Ὑψηλάντην καὶ Γεώργιον Καντακοζηνὸν, φέροντας τὰ πρῶτα τῆς Ἑταιρείας, καὶ μὲ ἀπερίγραπτον ἔνθουσιασμὸν ἐτοιμαζομένους διὰ νὰ κινηθῶσι κατὰ τοῦ Σουλτάνου. Τὸν αὐτὸν σχεδὸν ἐνθουσιασμὸν ἔβλεπέ τις οὐ μόνον κατ’ ἐκεῖνα τὰ μέρη, ἀλλὰ καθ’ ὅλην τὴν Ἑλλάδα, τόσον εἰς σημαντικοὺς, ὅσον καὶ παντὸς ἐπαγγέλματος Ἕλληνας κατοικοῦντας εἰς πόλεις, χώρας καὶ χωρία. Δὲν συστέλλομαι νὰ ὁμολογήσω, ὅτι ἤμην ἐναντίος τοῦ τοιούτου κινήματος κατὰ τοῦ Σουλτάνου· ὄχι διότι δὲν ἐπεθύμουν τὴν ἐλευθερίαν τοῦ Ἔθνους μου, ἀλλὰ διότι μ’ ἐφαίνετο ἄωρον τὸ κίνημα, μὲ τὸ νὰ ἦσαν ἀπειροπόλεμοι οἱ Ἕλληνες, καὶ οἱ πλεῖστοι ἄοπλοι, ὁ δὲ κίνδυνος μέγας.”[40]
Ο ΚΟΣΣΟΥΤ ΕΝ ΑΜΕΡΙΚΗ.
“Τήν 6 Δεκεμβρίου εἰσήλθεν ὁ ἀρχηγὸς τῆς Οὐγγαρικῆς δημοκρατίας εἰς τὴν πρωτεύουσαν πόλιν τῶν ἡνωμένων Πολιτειῶν. Ἀπὸ τῆς πρώτης στιγμῆς τῆς ἀφίξεως του ὅλοι οἱ ζωγράφοι παρουσιάσθησαν διὰ νὰ λάβωσι τὴν εἰκόνα τοῦ διὰ τῆς ἡλιοτυπίας, ἀλλ’ ὁ Κοσσοὺθ κατ’ οὐδένα πρόπον δὲν ἠθέλησε νὰ δεχθῇ τοῦτο. Ἄλλος τις εὐφυέστερος καλλιτέχνης ἐφεῦρε τὸ μέσον νὰ τὴν λάβῃ ἄκοντος αὐτοῦ. Ἔθεσε τὴν μηχανήν του εἴς τι παράθυρον κατα τὴν διάβασίν του καὶ ἐπροκάλεσε μίαν ἔριν ὲν τῇ ὁδῷ διὰ νὰ σταματήσῃ τὴν τέθριππόν του. Τοιουτοτρόπως δὲ κατώρθωσε νὰ λάβῃ λάθρα οὐχὶ μόνον τὴν εἰκόνα τοῦ Μαγυάρου Ἥρωος, ἀλλὰ καὶ ἄλλων τεσσάρων εὑρισκομένων μετ’ αὐτοῦ ἐν τῇ ἁμάξῃ. Ὁ Κοσσοὺθ εὕρισκετο ἐντὸς ἁμάξης ὑπὸ ἕξ καστανοχρόων ἵππων συρομένης ἐφόρει δὲ στολὴν Οὐγγρικὴν, καὶ ἐπὶ τοῦ πίλου τοῦ μέλαν πτερόν.”[41]