ὄλβον ὑπέρτατον οἱ σχεῖν, οἵ τε καὶ χρυσαμπύκων
μελπομενᾶν ἐν ὄρει Μοισᾶν, καὶ ἐν ἑπταπύλοις
ἄϊον Θήβαις ..[[61]]..
There is a limpidness in that, a want of salient points to seize and transfer, which makes imitation impossible, except by a genius akin to the genius which produced it.
Greek simplicity and Greek grace are inimitable; but it is said that the Iliad may still be ballad-poetry while infinitely superior to all other ballads, and that, in my specimens of English ballad-poetry, I have been unfair. Well, no doubt there are better things in English ballad-poetry than
Now Christ thee save, thou proud portér, ...
but the real strength of a chain, they say, is the strength of its weakest link; and what I was trying to show you was, that the English ballad-style is not an instrument of enough compass and force to correspond to the Greek hexameter; that, owing to an inherent weakness in it as an epic style, it easily runs into one or two faults, either it is prosaic and humdrum, or, trying to avoid that fault, and to make itself lively (se faire vif), it becomes pert and jaunty. To show that, the passage about King Adland’s porter serves very well. But these degradations are not proper to a true epic instrument, such as the Greek hexameter.
You may say, if you like, when you find Homer’s verse, even in describing the plainest matter, neither humdrum nor jaunty, that this is because he is so incomparably better a poet than other balladists, because he is Homer. But take the whole range of Greek epic poetry, take the later poets, the poets of the last ages of this poetry, many of them most indifferent, Coluthus, Tryphiodorus, Quintus of Smyrna, Nonnus. Never will you find in this instrument of the hexameter, even in their hands, the vices of the ballad-style in the weak moments of this last: everywhere the hexameter, a noble, a truly epical instrument, rather resists the weakness of its employer than lends itself to it. Quintus of Smyrna is a poet of merit, but certainly not a poet of a high order: with him, too, epic poetry, whether in the character of its prosody or in that of its diction, is no longer the epic poetry of earlier and better times, nor epic poetry as again restored by Nonnus: but even in Quintus of Smyrna, I say, the hexameter is still the hexameter; it is a style which the ballad-style, even in the hands of better poets, cannot rival. And in the hands of inferior poets, the ballad-style sinks to vices of which the hexameter, even in the hands of a Tryphiodorus, never can become guilty.
But a critic, whom it is impossible to read without pleasure, and the disguise of whose initials I am sure I may be allowed to penetrate, Mr Spedding says that he ‘denies altogether that the metrical movement of the English hexameter has any resemblance to that of the Greek’. Of course, in that case, if the two metres in no respect correspond, praise accorded to the Greek hexameter as an epical instrument will not extend to the English. Mr Spedding seeks to establish his proposition by pointing out that the system of accentuation differs in the English and in the Virgilian hexameter; that in the first, the accent and the long syllable (or what has to do duty as such) coincide, in the second they do not. He says that we cannot be so sure of the accent with which Greek verse should be read as of that with which Latin should; but that the lines of Homer in which the accent and the long syllable coincide, as in the English hexameter, are certainly very rare. He suggests a type of English hexameter in agreement with the Virgilian model, and formed on the supposition that ‘quantity is as distinguishable in English as in Latin or Greek by any ear that will attend to it’. Of the truth of this supposition he entertains no doubt. The new hexameter will, Mr Spedding thinks, at least have the merit of resembling, in its metrical movement, the classical hexameter, which merit the ordinary English hexameter has not. But even with this improved hexameter he is not satisfied; and he goes on, first to suggest other metres for rendering Homer, and finally to suggest that rendering Homer is impossible.
A scholar to whom all who admire Lucretius owe a large debt of gratitude, Mr Munro, has replied to Mr Spedding. Mr Munro declares that ‘the accent of the old Greeks and Romans resembled our accent only in name, in reality was essentially different’; that ‘our English reading of Homer and Virgil has in itself no meaning’; and that ‘accent has nothing to do with the Virgilian hexameter’. If this be so, of course the merit which Mr Spedding attributes to his own hexameter, of really corresponding with the Virgilian hexameter, has no existence. Again; in contradiction to Mr Spedding’s assertion that lines in which (in our reading of them) the accent and the long syllable coincide[[62]], as in the ordinary English hexameter, are ‘rare even in Homer’, Mr Munro declares that such lines, ‘instead of being rare, are among the very commonest types of Homeric rhythm’. Mr Spedding asserts that ‘quantity is as distinguishable in English as in Latin or Greek by any ear that will attend to it’; but Mr Munro replies, that in English ‘neither his ear nor his reason recognises any real distinction of quantity except that which is produced by accentuated and unaccentuated syllables’. He therefore arrives at the conclusion that in constructing English hexameters, ‘quantity must be utterly discarded; and longer or shorter unaccentuated syllables can have no meaning, except so far as they may be made to produce sweeter or harsher sounds in the hands of a master’.