Letter II.
Dear Mr Editor—I should like to offer you some more of my criticisms on the hexameters which have been written in English, and, by your good leave, will try to do so at some future time. But there are probably some of your readers who entertain the prejudices against English hexameters which we often hear from English critics of the last generation. I cannot come to any understanding with these readers about special hexameters, till I have said something of these objections to hexameters in general. One of these objections I tried to dispose of in a former missive; namely, that “we cannot have good hexameters in English, because we have so few spondees.” There are still other erroneous doctrines commonly entertained relative to this matter, which may be thus briefly expressed;—that in hexameters we adopt a difference of long and short syllables, such as does not regulate other forms of English versification; and that the versification itself—the movement of the hexameter—is borrowed from Greek and Latin poetry. Now, in opposition to these opinions, I am prepared to show that our English hexameters suppose no other relations of strong and weak syllables than those which govern our other kinds of verse;—and that the hexameter movement is quite familiar to the native English ear.
The first of these truths, I should have supposed to be, by this time, generally acknowledged among all writers and readers of English verse: if it had not been that I have lately seen, in some of our hexametrists, a reference to a difference of long, and short, as something which we ought to have, in addition to the differences of strong and weak syllables, in order to make our hexameters perfect. One of these writers has taken the model hexameter—
“In the hexameter rises the fountain’s silvery column;”
and has objected to it that the first syllable of column is short. But, my dear sir, it is not shorter than the first syllable of collar, or of the Latin collum! The fact is, that in hexameters, as in all other English verses, the ear knows nothing of long and short as the foundation of verse. All verse, to an English ear, is governed by the succession of strong and weak syllables. Take a stanza of Moore’s:—
“When in death I shall calm recline,
O bear my heart to my mistress dear.
Tell her it lived upon smiles and wine,
Of the brightest hue while it linger’d here.”
I have marked the strong syllables, which stand in the place of long ones, so far as the actual existence of verse is concerned; though no doubt the smoothness of the verse is promoted by having the light syllables short also, that they may glide rapidly away. But this, I say, though favourable to smoothness, is not essential to verse: thus the syllable death, though strong, is short; I and while, though weak, are long.
Now this alternation, in a certain order, of strong and weak syllables, is the essential condition of all English verse, and of hexameters among the rest. Long and short syllables, to English ears, are superseded in their effect by strong and weak accents; and even when we read Greek and Latin verses, so far as we make the versification perceptible, we do so by putting strong accents on the long syllables. The English ear has no sense of any versification which is not thus constructed.
I had imagined that all this was long settled in the minds of all readers of poetry; and that all notion of syllables in English being long, for purposes of versification, because they contain a long vowel or a diphthong, or a vowel before two consonants, had been obliterated ages ago. I knew, indeed, that the first English hexametrists had tried to conform themselves to the Latin rules of quantity. Thus, as we learn from Spenser, they tried to make the second syllable of carpenter long; and constructed their verses so that they would scan according to Latin rules. Such are Surry’s hexameters; for instance:—
“Unto a caitiff wretch whom long affliction holdeth,
Grant yet, grant yet a look to the last monument of his anguish.”