Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 9.djvu/501

 12 s. ix. NOV. 19, 1921.] NOTES AND QUERIES. 411 PASSING STRESS. (12 S. ix. 241, 263, 283, 303, 325, 348, 366.) I HAVE read with very great interest this series of articles on a subject too often ignored. Even people who notice changes of vocalization seem sometimes to assume that stresses remain unalterable. These articles form a rich storehouse of examples, well illustrated by quotations. Not, of course, that the lists are or can be ex- haustive ; readers will doubtless supply other instances of change. I, for my part, miss words like realize and recognize ; purify, magnify, vilify ; pioneer and privateer ; crinoline, gelatine, magazine to name but a few. In all these (though opinions differ about the last-mentioned word) I seem to recognize among educated speakers a ten- dency not to put exclusive stress on the final syllable, but rather to share it with the first. In Scotland, I am told, this tendency is still more marked ; I am assured that there j during the war many people said canteen. As j to this I can offer no opinion. My object in writing, however, is to enter one qualification as regards verse. It must not be assumed that whenever a disyllable (or even a trisyllable) occurs unusually, I there is absolute transference of accent. Very often, I feel sure, the poet intends us to put a double stress, a stress on each syllable, thus compelling us to linger on and so take notice of the word. This is how I should explain such quoted words, i at any rate in recent writers, as extreme, serene, forlorn, subdu'd, complete, obscure, July (Tennyson wrote " The cuckoo of a ! worse July "), uproar, upright, midnight, impure ; and many more might be added, j In a poem published this month, Mr. Yeats j seems to accentuate nightmare on the second syllable. Is this an Irishism, like Belfast, i Armagh, &c., or is not the above explana- tion more probable ? Of course I do not deny that actual transference does some- times take place, as when the access of ; Shelley becomes the access of later verse, and detail and retail became detail and retail, and names like Balfour, Dunlop, ; Meredith lose their native accentuation. But it would be rash in the extreme to assume that this takes place in all instances like those quoted above. Poets even seem to delight in repeating ' the same word with contrary pronuncia- tions in the same line or couplet. Thus Milton writes : Ordain'd without redemption, without end. Shelley has : A divine presence in a place divine, and Palgrave : The unknown future lies Hid in the God unknown. Similarly, they will sometimes give two i beats to a trisyllable, and anon only one, i as in this of Tennyson's : The Queen of Scots at least is Catholic. Ay, Madam, Catholic ; but I will not have. . . Such nuances must be remembered in dealing j with these matters. If doubt is felt about the above explana- tion, I would ask the critic to scan this line from Keats : The enchantment that afterward befel. To say that this word must be pronounced enchantment is surely too crude. Rather, 1 think, the poet wished us to dwell linger- ingly and lovingly on the word, forgetting for the moment the incidence of stress, and feeling the mystery and magic of the idea it calls up. But when Mr. Yeats, in the poem already referred to, gives us a ten -syllable line : That insolent fiend Robert Artisson, my ear rebels. I do not want to dwell lovingly on the word insolent, giving full value to each of its three syllables ; I want to utter it sharply and vigorously and be done with it. We must remember, however, that Irish critics accuse us of over-accenting our words, and that this hyper-accentuation is shared by no European language, except German to some extent. Possibly our poets know this, and take pleasure in sometimes forcing us to forget our dominat- ing stress-accent and fall back on the mere original value of the syllables. T. S. OMOND. 14, Calverley Park, Tunbridge Wells. P.S. The name Artemus is interesting. In U.S.A., I understand, it is accented on the second syllable ; when it came here, we accented the first syllable. I imagine that when Shelley, in Epipsy- chidion, wrote "... one intense Diffusion, one serene Omnipresence," he must have accented the last word similarly to omnipotence. May I refer to those who have been in- terested in PROF. STOCKLEY'S admirable contributions under this head to Nares's treatment of the same subject in- his ' Elements of Orthoepy,' published in 1774 ? Nares gives something like 1,600 instances of changes in the accentuation of familiar works, and though he has nothing like