Page:On translating Homer (1905).djvu/135

 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