and—ουδε εοικε—
as they are printed, and admires the rhythm. When he endures with exemplary patience such hiatuses, such dactyls as ἑεκυ, ουδεε, such a spondee as ρε δει, I can hardly wonder at his complacency in his own spondees “Between,” “To a.” He finds nothing wrong in και πεδια λωτευντα or πολλα λισσομενη. But Homer sang,
φιλε swεκυρε δwεινος τε—ουδε wεwοικε—
και πεδια λλωτευντα ... πολλα λλισσομενη.
Mr Arnold is not satisfied with destroying Quantity alone. After theoretically substituting Accent for it in his hexameters, he robs us of Accent also; and presents to us the syllables “to a,” both short and both necessarily unaccented, for a Spondee, in a pattern piece seven lines long, and with an express and gratuitous remark, that in using ‘to a’ for a Spondee, he has perhaps relied too much on accent. I hold up these phenomena in Mr Arnold as a warning to all scholars, of the pit of delusion into which they will fall, if they allow themselves to talk fine about the ‘Homeric rhythm’ as now heard, and the duty of a translator to reproduce something of it.
It is not merely the sound and the metre of Homer, which are impaired by the loss of his radical w; in extreme cases the sense also is confused. Thus if a scholar be asked, what is the meaning of ἐείσατο in the Iliad? he will have to reply: If it stands for eweisato, it means, ‘he was like’, and is related to the English root wis and wit, Germ. wiss, Lat. vid; but it may also mean ‘he went’—a very eccentric Homerism,—in which case we should perhaps write it eyeisato, as in old English we have he yode or yede instead of he goed, gaed, since too the current root in Greek and Latin i (go) may be accepted as ye, answering to German geh, English go. Thus two words, eweisato, ‘he was like’, eyeisato, ‘he went’, are confounded in our text. I will add, that in the Homeric
—ἤϋτε wέθνεα (y)εῖσι—(Il. 2, 87)
—διὰ πρὸ δὲ (y)είσατο καὶ τῆς (Il. 4, 138)
my ear misses the consonant, though Mr Arnold’s (it seems) does not. If we were ordered to read dat ting in Chaucer for that thing, it would at first ‘surprise’ us as ‘grotesque’, but after this objection had vanished, we should still feel it ‘antiquated’. The confusion of thick and tick, thread and tread, may illustrate the possible effect of dropping the w in Homer. I observe that Benfey’s Greek Root Lexicon has a list of 454 digammated words, most of which are Homeric. But it is quite needless to press the argument to its full.
If as much learning had been spent on the double λ and on the y and h of Homer, as on the digamma, it might perhaps now be conceded that we have lost, not one, but three or four consonants from his text. That λ in λύω or λούω was ever a complex sound in Greek, I see nothing to indicate; hence that λ, and the λ of λιταὶ, λιαρὸς, seem to have been different consonants in Homer, as l and ll in Welsh. As to h and y I assert nothing, except that critics appear too hastily to infer, that if a consonant has disappeared, it must needs be w. It is credible that the Greek h was once strong enough to stop hiatus or elision, as the English, and much more the Asiatic h. The later Greeks, after turning the character H into a vowel, seem to have had no idea of a consonant h in the middle of a word, nor any means of writing the consonant y. Since G passes through gh into the sounds h, w, y, f (as in English and German is obvious), it is easy to confound them all under the compendious word ‘digamma’. I should be glad to know that Homer’s forms were as well understood by modern scholars as Mr Arnold lays down.