Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/601

192 of the Greek hexameter itself, and a power (due to the great variation of which it admits) of attaining certain astonishing effects, suffers from this very quality in a tendency to relapse into formlessness. It is apt to revert into the mere inchoate metre from which it and the hexameter are both historical evolutions.

This tendency acts in two ways: in one way by stripping the metre, as one might say, to the bone. The couplet,

goes back to the metre of the Niebelungenlied, of Nævius's "Punic War," and in all probability of the last Greek epics, out of which was gradually evolved what we know by the name of Homer. But on the other hand it is apt to become overloaded. In lines like

or,

the laxity of the metre allows it to pass into something that is barely metrical. In original writing the ear and taste of a good craftsman will keep him safe from both extremes. But in a translation, as all translators know, there is a temptation almost irresistible to take advantage of any licence the metre allows, a little here and a little there, till at last the accumulated result goes far beyond what the translator had meant or what the reader can readily approve. This is the reason why a successful verse translation, be it of Homer or