Part 8
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.
I will not assert that this is everywhere improper in the Odyssey; but no part of the Iliad occurs to me in which it is proper, and I have totally excluded it in my own practice. I notice it but once in Mr Gladstone’s specimens, and it certainly offends my taste as out of harmony with the gravity of the rest, viz.
My ships shall bound ĭn thĕ morning’s light.
In Shakspeare we have _i’th’_ and _o’th’_ for monosyllables, but (so scrupulous am I in the midst of my ‘atrocities’) I never dream of such a liberty myself, much less of avowed ‘anapæsts’. So far do I go in the opposite direction, as to prefer to make such words as _Danai_, _victory_ three syllables, which even Mr Gladstone and Pope accept as dissyllabic. Some reviewers have called my metre _lege solutum_; which is as ridiculous a mistake as Horace made concerning Pindar. That, in passing. But surely Mr Arnold’s severe blow at Dr Maginn rebounds with double force upon himself.
To Péleus whý dĭd wĕ gíve you?— Hécŭbă’s griéf nor Príăm my fáther’s— Thoúsănds ŏf sórrows—
cannot be a _less_ detestable jig than that of Dr Maginn. And this objection holds against every accentual hexameter, even to those of Longfellow or Lockhart, if applied to grand poetry. For bombast, in a wild whimsical poem, Mr Clough has proved it to be highly appropriate; and I think, the more ‘rollicking’ is Mr Clough (if only I understand the word) the more successful his metre. Mr Arnold himself _feels_ what I say against ‘dactyls’, for on this very ground he advises largely superseding them by spondees; and since what he calls a spondee is any pair of syllables of which the former is accentuable, his precept amounts to this, that the hexameter be converted into a line of six accentual trochees, with free liberty left of diversifying it, in any foot except the last, by Dr Maginn’s ‘detestable dance’. What more severe condemnation of the metre is imaginable than this mere description gives? ‘Six trochees’ seems to me the worst possible foundation for an English metre. I cannot imagine that Mr Arnold will give the slightest weight to this, as a judgment from me; but I do advise him to search in Samson Agonistes, Thalaba, Kehama, and Shelley’s works, for the phenomenon.
I have elsewhere insisted, but I here repeat, that for a long poem a trochaic beginning of the verse is most unnatural and vexatious in English, because so large a number of our sentences begin with unaccented syllables, and the vigour of a trochaic line eminently depends on the purity of its initial trochee. Mr Arnold’s feeble trochees already quoted (from _Bétween_ to _Tó a_) are all the fatal result of defying the tendencies of our language.
If by a happy combination any scholar could compose fifty _such_ English hexameters, as would convey a living likeness of the Virgilian metre, I should applaud it as valuable for initiating schoolboys into that metre: but there its utility would end. The method could not be profitably used for translating Homer or Virgil, plainly because it is impossible to say for whose service such a translation would be executed. Those who can read the original will never care to read _through_ any translation; and the unlearned look on all, even the best hexameters, whether from Southey, Lockhart or Longfellow, as odd and disagreeable prose. Mr Arnold deprecates appeal to popular taste: well he may! yet if the unlearned are to be our audience, we cannot defy them. I myself, before venturing to print, sought to ascertain how unlearned women and children would accept my verses. I could boast how children and half-educated women have extolled them; how greedily a working man has inquired for them, without knowing who was the translator; but I well know that this is quite insufficient to establish the merits of a translation. It is nevertheless _one_ point. ‘Homer is popular’, is one of the very few matters of fact in this controversy on which Mr Arnold and I are agreed. ‘English hexameters are not popular’, is a truth so obvious, that I do not yet believe he will deny it. Therefore, ‘Hexameters are not the metre for translating Homer’. Q. E. D.
I cannot but think that the very respectable scholars who pertinaciously adhere to the notion that English hexameters have something ‘epical’ in them, have no vivid _feeling_ of the difference between Accent and Quantity: and this is the less wonderful, since so very few persons have ever actually _heard_ quantitative verse. I have; by listening to Hungarian poems, read to me by my friend Mr Francis Pulszky, a native Magyar. He had not finished a single page, before I complained gravely of the monotony. He replied: ‘So do _we_ complain of it’: and then showed me, by turning the pages, that the poet cut the knot which he could not untie, by frequent changes of his metre. Whether it was a change of mere length, as from Iambic senarian to Iambic dimeter; or implied a fundamental change of time, as in music from _common_ to _minuet_ time; I cannot say. But, to my ear, nothing but a tune can ever save a quantitative metre from hideous monotony. It is like strumming a piece of very simple music on a single note. Nor only so; but the most beautiful of anthems, after it has been repeated a hundred times on a hundred successive verses, begins to pall on the ear. How much more would an entire book of Homer, if chanted at one sitting! I have the conviction, though I will not undertake to impart it to another, that if the living Homer could sing his lines to us, they would at first move in us the same pleasing interest as an elegant and simple melody from an African of the Gold Coast; but that, after hearing twenty lines, we should complain of meagreness, sameness, and _loss of moral expression_; and should judge the style to be _as_ inferior to our own oratorical metres, as the music of Pindar to our third-rate modern music. But if the poet, at our request, instead of singing the verses, read or spoke them, then from the loss of well-marked time and the ascendency reassumed by the prose-accent, we should be as helplessly unable to _hear_ any metre in them, as are the modern Greeks.
I expect that Mr Arnold will reply to this, that he _reads_ and does not _sing_ Homer, and yet he finds his verses to be melodious and not monotonous. To this, I retort, that he begins by wilfully pronouncing Greek falsely, according to the laws of _Latin_ accent, and artificially assimilating the Homeric to the Virgilian line. Virgil has compromised between the ictus metricus and the prose accent, by exacting that the two coincide in the two last feet and generally forbidding it in the second and third foot. What is called the ‘feminine cæsura’ gives (in the Latin language) coincidence on the third foot. Our extreme familiarity with these laws of compromise enables us to anticipate recurring sounds and satisfies our ear. But the Greek prose accent, by reason of oxytons and paroxytons, and accent on the ante-penultima in spite of a long penultima, totally resists all such compromise; and proves that particular form of melody, which our scholars enjoy in Homer, to be an unhistoric imitation of Virgil.
I am aware, there is a bold theory, whispered if not published, that,—so out-and-out _Æolian_ was Homer,—his laws of accent must have been almost Latin. According to this, Erasmus, following the track of Virgil blindly, has taught us to pronounce Euripides and Plato ridiculously ill, but Homer, with an accuracy of accent which puts Aristarchus to shame. This is no place for discussing so difficult a question. Suffice it to say, _first_, that Mr Arnold cannot take refuge in such a theory, since he does not admit that Homer was antiquated to Euripides; _next_, that admitting the theory to him, still the loss of the Digamma destroys to him the true rhythm of Homer. I shall recur to both questions below. I here add, that our English pronunciation even of Virgil often so ruins Virgil’s own _quantities_, that there is something either of delusion or of pedantry in our scholars’ self-complacency in the rhythm which they elicit.
I think it fortunate for Mr Arnold, that he had _not_ ‘courage to translate Homer’; for he must have failed to make it acceptable to the unlearned. But if the public ear prefers ballad metres, still (Mr Arnold assumes) ‘the scholar’ is with him in this whole controversy. Nevertheless it gradually comes out that neither is this the case, but he himself is in the minority. P. 110, he writes: ‘When one observes the boistering, rollicking way in which Homer’s English admirers—even men of genius, like the late Professor Wilson—love to talk of Homer and his poetry, one cannot help feeling that there is no very deep community of nature between them and the object of their enthusiasm.’ It does not occur to Mr Arnold that the defect of perception lies with himself, and that Homer has more sides than he has discovered. He deplores that Dr Maginn, and others whom he names, err with me, in believing that our ballad-style is the nearest approximation to that of Homer; and avows that ‘_it is time to say plainly_’ (p. 46) that Homer is not of the ballad-type. So in p. 45, ‘—this _popular_, but, _it is time to say_, this erroneous analogy’ between the ballad and Homer. Since it is reserved for Mr Arnold to turn the tide of opinion; since it is a task not yet achieved, but remains to be achieved by his authoritative enunciation; he confesses that hitherto I have with me the suffrage of scholars. With this confession, a little more diffidence would be becoming, if diffidence were possible to the fanaticism with which he idolises hexameters. P. 88, he says: ‘The hexameter has a natural dignity, which repels both the jaunty style and the jog-trot style, etc.... _The translator who uses it cannot too religiously follow the_ INSPIRATION OF HIS METRE’ etc. Inspiration from a metre which has no recognised type? from a metre which the _heart_ and _soul_ of the nation ignores? I believe, if the metre can inspire anything, it is to frolic and gambol with Mr Clough. Mr Arnold’s English hexameter cannot be a higher inspiration to him, than the true hexameter was to a Greek: yet that metre inspired strains of totally different essential genius and merit.
But I claim Mr Arnold himself as confessing that our ballad _metre_ is epical, when he says that Scott is ‘_bastard_-epic’. I do not admit that his quotations from Scott are all Scott’s best, nor anything like it; but if they were, it would only prove something against Scott’s genius or talent, nothing about his metre. The Κύπρια ἔπη or Ἰλίου πέρσις were probably very inferior to the Iliad; but no one would on that account call them or the Frogs and Mice bastard-epic. No one would call a bad tale of Dryden or of Crabbe bastard-epic. The application of the word to Scott virtually concedes what I assert. Mr Arnold also calls Macaulay’s ballads ‘pinchbeck’; but a man needs to produce something very noble himself, before he can afford thus to sneer at Macaulay’s ‘Lars Porsena’.
Before I enter on my own ‘metrical exploits’, I must get rid of a disagreeable topic. Mr Arnold’s repugnance to them has led him into forms of attack, which I do not know how to characterize. I shall state my complaints as concisely as I can, and so leave them.
1. I do not seek for any similarity of _sound_ in an English accentual metre to that of a Greek quantitative metre; besides that Homer writes in a highly vocalized tongue, while ours is overfilled with consonants. I have disowned this notion of similar rhythm in the strongest terms (p. xvii of my Preface), expressly because some critics had imputed this aim to me in the case of Horace. I summed up: ‘It is not audible sameness of metre, but a likeness of moral genius which is to be aimed at’. I contrast the audible to the moral. Mr Arnold suppresses this contrast, and writes as follows, p. 34. Mr Newman tells us that he has found a metre like in moral genius to Homer’s. His judge has still the same answer: reproduce THEN _on our ear_ something of ‘the effect produced by the _movement_ of Homer’. He recurs to the same fallacy in p. 57. ‘For whose EAR do those two _rhythms_ produce impressions of (_to use Mr Newman’s own words_) “similar moral genius”’? His reader will naturally suppose that ‘like in moral genius’ is with me an eccentric phrase for ‘like in musical cadence’. The only likeness to the ear which I have admitted, is, that the one and the other are primitively made _for music_. That, Mr Arnold knows, is a matter of fact, whether a ballad be well or ill written. If he pleases, he may hold the rhythm of our metre to be necessarily inferior to Homer’s and to his own; but when I fully explained in my preface what were my tests of ‘like moral genius’, I cannot understand his suppressing them, and perverting the sense of my words.
2. In p. 52, Mr Arnold quotes Chapman’s translation of ἆ δείλω, ‘Poor wretched _beasts_’ (of Achilles’ horses), on which he comments severely. He does _not_ quote me. Yet in p. 100, after exhibiting Cowper’s translation of the same passage, he adds: ‘There is no want of dignity here, as in the versions of Chapman and of _Mr Newman, which I have already quoted_’. Thus he leads the reader to believe that I have the same phrase as Chapman! In fact, my translation is:
Ha! why on Peleus, mortal prince, Bestowed we _you_, unhappy!
If he had done me the justice of quoting, it is possible that some readers would not have thought my rendering intrinsically ‘wanting in dignity’, or less noble than Mr Arnold’s own, which is:
Ah! unhappy pair! to Peleus[36] why did we give you, To a mortal?
In p. 52, he with very gratuitous insult remarks, that ‘Poor wretched beasts’ is a little over-familiar; but this is no objection to it for the ballad-manner[37]: _it is good enough_ ... _for Mr Newman’s Iliad_, ... etc.’ Yet I myself have _not_ thought it good enough for my Iliad.
3. In p. 107, Mr Arnold gives his own translation of the discourse between Achilles and his horse; and prefaces it with the words, ‘I will take the passage in which both Chapman and Mr Newman _have already so much excited our astonishment_’. But he did not quote my translation of the noble part of the passage, consisting of 19 lines; he has merely quoted[38] the tail of it, 5 lines; which are altogether inferior. Of this a sufficient indication is, that Mr Gladstone has translated the 19 and omitted the 5. I shall below give my translation parallel to Mr Gladstone’s. The curious reader may compare it with Mr Arnold’s, if he choose.
4. In p. 102, Mr Arnold quotes from Chapman as a translation of ὅταν ποτ’ ὀλώλῃ Ιλιος ἱρὴ,
‘When sacred Troy shall _shed her tow’rs for tears of overthrow_’;
and adds: ‘What Mr Newman’s manner of rendering would be, you can by this time sufficiently imagine for yourselves’. _Would be!_ Why does he set his readers to ‘imagine’, when in fewer words he could tell them what my version _is_? It stands thus:
A day, when sacred Ilium | for overthrow is destin’d,—
which may have faults unperceived by me, but is in my opinion far better than Mr Arnold’s, and certainly did not deserve to be censured side by side with Chapman’s absurdity. I must say plainly; a critic has no right to hide what I have written, and stimulate his readers to despise me by these _indirect_ methods.
I proceed to my own metre. It is exhibited in this stanza of Campbell:
By this the storm grew loud apace: The waterwraith was shrieking, And in the scowl of heav’n each face Grew dark as they were speaking.
Whether I use this metre well or ill, I maintain that it is essentially a noble metre, a popular metre, a metre of great capacity. _It is essentially the national ballad metre_, for the double rhyme is an accident. Of _course_ it can be applied to low, as well as to high subjects; else it would _not_ be popular: it would _not_ be ‘of a like moral genius’ to the Homeric metre, which was available equally for the comic poem _Margites_, for the precepts of Pythagoras, for the pious prosaic hymn of Cleanthes, for the driest prose of a naval catalogue[39], in short, _for all early thought_. Mr Arnold appears to forget, though he cannot be ignorant, that prose-composition is later than Homer, and that in the epical days every initial effort at prose history was carried on in _Homeric doggerel_ by the Cyclic poets, who traced the history of Troy _ab ovo_ in consecutive chronology. I say, he is merely inadvertent, he cannot be ignorant, that the Homeric _metre_, like my metre, subserves prosaic thought with the utmost facility; but I hold it to be, not indavertence, but blindness, when he does not see that Homer’s τὸν δ’ ἀπαμειβόμενος is a line of as thoroughly unaffected _oratio pedestris_ as any verse of Pythagoras or Horace’s Satires. But on diction I defer to speak, till I have finished the topic of metre.
I do not say that any measure is faultless. Every measure has its foible: mine has that fault which every uniform line must have; it is liable to monotony. This is evaded of course, as in the hexameter or rather as in Milton’s line, first, by varying the cæsura, secondly, by varying certain feet, within narrow and well understood limits, thirdly, by irregularity in the strength of accents, fourthly, by varying the weight of the unaccented syllables also. All these things are needed, _for the mere sake of breaking uniformity_. I will not here assert that Homer’s many marvellous freedoms, such as ἑκηβόλου Ἀπόλλωνος, were dictated by this aim, like those in the _Paradise Lost_; but I do say, that it is most unjust, most unintelligent, in critics, to produce _single_ lines from me, and criticize them as rough or weak, instead of examining them and presenting them as part of _a mass_. How would Shakspeare stand this sort of test? nay, or Milton? The metrical laws of a long poem cannot be the same as of a sonnet: single verses are organic elements of a great whole. A crag must not be cut like a gem. Mr Arnold should remember Aristotle’s maxim, that popular eloquence (and such is Homer’s) should be broad, rough and highly coloured, like scene painting, not polished into delicacy like miniature. But I speak now of metre, not yet of diction. In _any_ long and popular poem it is a mistake to wish every line to conform severely to a few types; but to claim this of a translator of _Homer_ is a doubly unintelligent exaction, when Homer’s own liberties transgress all bounds; many of them being feebly disguised by later double spellings, as εἵως, εἷος, invented for his special accommodation.