Page:On translating Homer (1905).djvu/131

Rh 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 ŏ]f 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