[60]. Purgatory, xxiii, 127.
[61]. ‘A secure time fell to the lot neither of Peleus the son of Æacus, nor of the godlike Cadmus; howbeit these are said to have had, of all mortals, the supreme of happiness, who heard the golden-snooded Muses sing, one of them on the mountain (Pelion), the other in seven-gated Thebus’.
[62]. Lines such as the first of the Odyssey
Ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὅς μάλα πολλὰ....
[63]. Substantially, however, in the question at issue between Mr Munro and Mr Spedding, I agree with Mr Munro. By the italicized words in the following sentence, ‘The rhythm of the Virgilian hexameter depends entirely on cæsura, pause, and a due arrangement of words’, he has touched, it seems to me, in the constitution of this hexameter, the central point which Mr Spedding misses. The accent, or heightened tone, of Virgil in reading his own hexameters, was probably far from being the same thing as the accent or stress with which we read them. The general effect of each line, in Virgil’s mouth, was probably therefore something widely different from what Mr Spedding assumes it to have been: an ancient’s accentual reading was something which allowed the metrical beat of the Latin line to be far more perceptible than our accentual reading allows it to be.
On the question as to the real rhythm of the ancient hexameter, Mr Newman has in his Reply a page quite admirable for force and precision. Here he is in his element, and his ability and acuteness have their proper scope. But it is true that the modern reading of the ancient hexameter is what the modern hexameter has to imitate, and that the English reading of the Virgilian hexameter is as Mr Spedding describes it. Why this reading has not been imitated by the English hexameter, I have tried to point out in the text.
[64]. Such a minor change I have attempted by occasionally shifting, in the first foot of the hexameter, the accent from the first syllable to the second. In the current English hexameter, it is on the first. Mr Spedding, who proposes radically to subvert the constitution of this hexameter, seems not to understand that anyone can propose to modify it partially; he can comprehend revolution in this metre, but not reform. Accordingly he asks me how I can bring myself to say, ‘Bétween that and the ships’, or ‘Thére sat fifty men’; or how I can reconcile such forcing of the accent with my own rule, that ‘hexameters must read themselves’. Presently he says that he cannot believe I do pronounce these words so, but that he thinks I leave out the accent in the first foot altogether, and thus get a hexameter with only five accents. He will pardon me: I pronounce, as I suppose he himself does, if he reads the words naturally, ‘Between that and the ships’, and ‘There sát fifty men’. Mr Spedding is familiar enough with this accent on the second syllable in Virgil’s hexameters; in ‘et té montosæ’, or ‘Velóces jaculo’. Such a change is an attempt to relieve the monotony of the current English hexameter by occasionally altering the position of one of its accents; it is not an attempt to make a wholly new English hexameter by habitually altering the position of four of them. Very likely it is an unsuccessful attempt; but at any-rate it does not violate what I think is the fundamental rule for English hexameters, that may be such as to read themselves without necessitating, on the reader’s part, any non-natural putting-on or taking-off accent. Hexameters like these of Mr Longfellow,
‘In that delightful land which is washed by the Delaware’s waters’,
and,
‘As if they fain would appease the Dryads, whose haunts they molested’,