Page:On translating Homer. Last words. A lecture given at Oxford.djvu/55

44 able, gradually somewhat to lessen through minor changes, suggested by the ancient hexameter, but respecting the general constitution of the modern: the notion of making it disappear altogether by the critic’s inventing in his closet a new constitutionin the first foot of the hexameter, the accent from the first syllable to the second. In the current English hexameter it is on the first. Mr. Spedding, who proposes radically to subvert the constitution of this hexameter, seems not to understand that any one can propose to modify it partially; he can comprehend revolution in this metre, but not reform. Accordingly he asks me how I can bring myself to say ‘Bétween that and the ships,’ or ‘Thére sate fifty men;’ or how I can reconcile such forcing of the accent with my own rule, that ‘hexameters must read themselves.’ Presently he says that he cannot believe I do pronounce these words so, but that he thinks I leave out the accent in the first foot altogether, and thus get an hexameter with only five accents. He will pardon me: I pronounce, as I suppose he himself does, if he reads the words naturally, ‘Betwéen that and the ships,’ and ‘There sáte fifty men.’ Mr. Spedding is familiar enough with this accent on the second syllable in Virgil’s hexameters; in ‘Et té montosa,’ or ‘Velóces jaculo.’ Such a change is an attempt to relieve the monotony of the current English hexameter by occasionally altering the position of one of its accents; it is not an attempt to make a wholly new English hexameter by habitually altering the position of four of them. Very likely it is an unsuccessful attempt; but at any rate it does not violate what I think is the fundamental rule for English hexameters,—that they be such as to read themselves, without necessitating, on the reader’s part, any non-natural putting-on or taking-off of accent. Hexameters like these of Mr. Longfellow,In that delightful land which is washed by the Delaware’s waters and,As if they fain would appease the Dryads, whose haunts they molested violate this rule; and they are very common. I think the blemish of Mr. Dart’s recent meritorious version of the Iliad is that it contains too many of them.