To a mortal? but ye are without old age and immortal.
Was it that ye with man, might have your thousands of sorrows?
For than man indeed there breathes no wretcheder creature,
Of all living things, that on earth are breathing and moving.
Upon this he apologises for ‘To a’, intended as a spondee in the fourth line, and ‘-dress’d his own’ for a dactyl in the second; liberties which, he admits, go rather far, but ‘do not actually spoil the run of the hexameter’. In a note, he attempts to palliate his deeds by recriminating on Homer, though he will not allow to me the same excuse. The accent (it seems) on the second syllable of αἰόλος makes it as impure a dactyl to a Greek as ‘death-destin’d’ is to us! Mr Arnold’s erudition in Greek metres is very curious, if he can establish that they take any cognisance at all of the prose accent, or that αἰολος is quantitatively more or less of a dactyl, according as the prose accent is on one or other syllable. His ear also must be of a very unusual kind, if it makes out that ‘death-destin’d’ is anything but a downright Molossus. Write it dethdestind, as it is pronounced, and the eye, equally with the ear, decides it to be of the same type as the word persistunt. In the lines just quoted, most readers will be slow to believe, that they have to place an impetus of the voice (an ictus metricus at least) on Bétween, In´ the, Thére sate, By´ their, A´nd with, A´nd he, Tó a, Fór than, O´f all. Here, in the course of thirteen lines, composed as a specimen of style, is found the same offence nine times repeated, to say nothing here of other deformities. Now contrast Mr Arnold’s severity against me[[35]], p. [87]: ‘It is a real fault when Mr Newman has:
Infátuáte! óh that thou wért | lord to some other army—
for here the reader is required, not for any special advantage to himself, but simply to save Mr Newman trouble, to place the accent on the insignificant word wert, where it has no business whatever’. Thus to the flaw which Mr Arnold admits nine times in thirteen pattern lines, he shows no mercy in me, who have toiled through fifteen thousand. Besides, on wert we are free at pleasure to place or not to place the accent; but in Mr Arnold’s Bétween, Tó a, etc., it is impossible or offensive.
To avoid a needlessly personal argument, I enlarge on the general question of hexameters. Others, scholars of repute, have given example and authority to English hexameters. As matter of curiosity, as erudite sport, such experiments may have their value. I do not mean to express indiscriminate disapproval, much less contempt. I have myself privately tried the same in Alcaics; and find the chief objection to be, not that the task is impossible, but that to execute it well is too difficult for a language like ours, overladen with consonants, and abounding with syllables neither distinctly long nor distinctly short, but of every intermediate length. Singing to a tune was essential to keep even Greek or Roman poetry to true time; to the English language it is of tenfold necessity. But if time is abandoned (as in fact it always is), and the prose accent has to do duty for the ictus metricus, the moral genius of the metre is fundamentally subverted. What previously was steady duplicate time (‘march-time’, as Professor Blackie calls it) vacillates between duplicate and triplicate. With Homer, a dactyl had nothing in it more tripping than a spondee: a crotchet followed by two quavers belongs to as grave an anthem as two crotchets. But Mr Arnold himself (p. [55]) calls the introduction of anapæsts by Dr Maginn into our ballad measure, ‘a detestable dance’: as in:
And scarcely hád shĕ bĕgún to wash,
Ere shé wăs ăwáre ŏf thĕ grisly gash.