Letter II.

Dear Mr Editor—I should like to offer you some more of my criticisms on the hexameters which have been written in English, and, by your good leave, will try to do so at some future time. But there are probably some of your readers who entertain the prejudices against English hexameters which we often hear from English critics of the last generation. I cannot come to any understanding with these readers about special hexameters, till I have said something of these objections to hexameters in general. One of these objections I tried to dispose of in a former missive; namely, that “we cannot have good hexameters in English, because we have so few spondees.” There are still other erroneous doctrines commonly entertained relative to this matter, which may be thus briefly expressed;—that in hexameters we adopt a difference of long and short syllables, such as does not regulate other forms of English versification; and that the versification itself—the movement of the hexameter—is borrowed from Greek and Latin poetry. Now, in opposition to these opinions, I am prepared to show that our English hexameters suppose no other relations of strong and weak syllables than those which govern our other kinds of verse;—and that the hexameter movement is quite familiar to the native English ear.

The first of these truths, I should have supposed to be, by this time, generally acknowledged among all writers and readers of English verse: if it had not been that I have lately seen, in some of our hexametrists, a reference to a difference of long, and short, as something which we ought to have, in addition to the differences of strong and weak syllables, in order to make our hexameters perfect. One of these writers has taken the model hexameter—

and has objected to it that the first syllable of column is short. But, my dear sir, it is not shorter than the first syllable of collar, or of the Latin collum! The fact is, that in hexameters, as in all other English verses, the ear knows nothing of long and short as the foundation of verse. All verse, to an English ear, is governed by the succession of strong and weak syllables. Take a stanza of Moore’s:—

I have marked the strong syllables, which stand in the place of long ones, so far as the actual existence of verse is concerned; though no doubt the smoothness of the verse is promoted by having the light syllables short also, that they may glide rapidly away. But this, I say, though favourable to smoothness, is not essential to verse: thus the syllable death, though strong, is short; I and while, though weak, are long.

Now this alternation, in a certain order, of strong and weak syllables, is the essential condition of all English verse, and of hexameters among the rest. Long and short syllables, to English ears, are superseded in their effect by strong and weak accents; and even when we read Greek and Latin verses, so far as we make the versification perceptible, we do so by putting strong accents on the long syllables. The English ear has no sense of any versification which is not thus constructed.

I had imagined that all this was long settled in the minds of all readers of poetry; and that all notion of syllables in English being long, for purposes of versification, because they contain a long vowel or a diphthong, or a vowel before two consonants, had been obliterated ages ago. I knew, indeed, that the first English hexametrists had tried to conform themselves to the Latin rules of quantity. Thus, as we learn from Spenser, they tried to make the second syllable of carpenter long; and constructed their verses so that they would scan according to Latin rules. Such are Surry’s hexameters; for instance:—

But this made their task extremely difficult, without bringing any gain which the ear could recognise; and I believe that the earlier attempts to naturalize the hexameter in England failed mainly in consequence of their being executed under these severe conditions, which prevented all facility and flow in the expression, and gave the popular ear no pleasure.

The successful German hexametrists have rejected all regard to the classical rules of quantity of syllables; and have, I conceive, shown us plainly that this is the condition of success in such an undertaking. Take, for instance, the beginning of Hermann und Dorothea:—

The penultimate dactyls in these lines, “unter dem Thorweg,” “Bemerkung ergÖtgend,” “Hansfrau und sagte,” “kommt auch der Nachbar,” have, in the place of short syllables, syllables which must be long, if any distinction of long and short, depending upon consonants and dipthongs, be recognised; but yet these are good and orderly dactyls, because in each we have a strong syllable followed by two weak ones. If we call such trissyllable feet dactyls, and in the same way describe other feet by their corresponding names in Greek and Latin verse, spondees, trochees, and the like, we shall be able to talk in an intelligible manner about English verse in general, and English hexameters in particular.

And I have now to show, in the second place, that English hexameters are readily accepted by the native ear, without any condition of discipline in Greek and Latin verse. I do not mean to say that hexameters have not a peculiar character among our forms of verse; and I should like to try to explain, on some future occasion, the mode in which the recollection of Homer and Virgil, in Greek and Latin, affects and modifies the pleasure which we receive from hexameter poems in German and English. But I say that, without any such reference, poems written in rigorous hexameters will be recognised by a common reader as easy current verse.

In order to bring out this point clearly, you must allow me, Mr Editor, to make my quotations with various readings of my own, which are requisite to exemplify the forms of verse of which I speak.

I begin by talking of “dactylics,” in spite of the Antijacobin. Dactylic measures are very familiar to our ears, and congenial to the genius of our versification. These lines are dactylics:—

But the lines may be also regarded as anapÆstics:—

In all these cases, the line begins with a weak syllable; and if the lines are regarded as dactylics, this syllable must be taken as a fragment of foot. When the line begins with a strong syllable, the dactylic character is more decided: as if the lines were,—

Now, in such examples, along with the trissyllable feet, dissyllable feet are often mixed, as their metrical equivalents: as

We may observe that there is, in this example, a kind of symmetry shown in preserving the dissyllable feet always in the second place, which is not without its effect on the ear. Some of these feet may be made two or three syllables at pleasure, as linger’d or lingerÈd. I will add the next stanza as a further example:—

That the verse so constructed is perfectly rhythmical, we know, by the exactness with which it lends itself to music. The musical bars would point out the divisions, or the number at least, of the feet, if we had any doubt upon that subject.

In order that we may the more distinctly perceive the mixture of two kinds of feet in this example, let us reduce it entirely to trissyllable feet, by slight changes in the expression:—

I have arranged this variation so that the incomplete feet at the end of one line and the beginning of the next in each distich, as well as the rest, make up a complete dactyl; and thus, the measure runs on through each two written lines in a long line of seven dactyls and a strong syllable. But it will be easily perceived, that if the feet had been left incomplete at the end of each written line, the pause in the metre would have supplied what was wanting, and would have prevented the verse from being perceived as irregular. Thus these are still true dactylic lines:——

I will now arrange the same passage so as to reduce it entirely to dissyllable feet, which alters the character of the versification.

As the dissyllable feet may be divided either as dactyls or as anapÆsts, so the dissyllable feet may be divided either as trochees or as iambuses. Thus we may scan either of these ways—

But in this case, as in that of dissyllable feet, the metre is more decidedly trochaic, because each line, (that is, each distich, as here written,) begins with a strong syllable.

The animated trochaic character, when once given by a few lines of this kind, continues in the movement of the verse, even when retarded by initial iambuses; as,

Here the weak syllables And, And, do not materially interrupt the trochaic verse. They may be taken as completing the trochee at the end of the preceding line.

In these verses, and in all English verses, there are no spondees, or feet consisting of two strong syllables. No foot in English metre has more than one strong syllable, and the weak syllables are appended to the strong ones, and swept along with them in the current of the metre. The equality between a trissyllable and a consecutive dissyllable foot, which the metre requires, is preserved by adding strength to the short syllable, so as to preserve the balance. Thus, when we say——

There is a strength given to bear, and mistress, which makes them metrically balance carry and conqueror in this verse,

It must be observed, however, that the proportion between heavy and light, or strong and weak, in syllables, is not always the same. When a dissyllable foot occurs in the place of a trissyllable one, in a metre of a generally trissyllabic character, the light syllable may be conceived as standing in the place of two, and is therefore more weighty than the light syllables of the trissyllabic feet. Thus, if we say—

the and is more weighty than it would be, if we were to say—

And if again we say—

the on is more weighty than the same syllable in upon. Hence, in these cases, smiles and, lived on, approach to spondees. But still there is a decided preponderance in the first syllables of each of these feet respectively.

I have hitherto considered dactylics with rhyme; of course the measure may be preserved, though the rhyme be omitted, either at the end of the alternate lines; as

Or altogether; as

In the absence of rhyme, each distich is detached, and the number of such distiches, or long lines, may be either odd or even.

I shall now take a shorter dactylic measure; and first, with alternate rhymes.

We see, in this example that the rhyme is a fetter to the construction. In this case, it is necessary to have three distichs which rhyme, in order to close the metre with the sentence.

We detach these distichs, or long lines, from each other, by rejecting the use of rhyme between successive distichs. We might make the two parts of the same long line rhyme thus:—

But these rhymes, even if written in one long line, are really two short lines with a double rhyme; and this measure, besides its difficulty, is destitute of dignity and grace. If we take the same measure, rejecting rhyme, and keep the dactylics pure, we have such distichs as these:—

But these may be written in long lines, thus:—

These verses are of a rhythm as familiar and distinct to the English ear as any which our poets use. Now these are hexameters consisting each of five dactyls and a trochee,—the trochee approaching to a spondee, as I have seen; yet still, not being a spondee, but having its first syllable decidedly strong in comparison with the second.

The above hexameters are perfectly regular, both in being purely dactylic, and in having the regular cÆsura, namely the end of a word at the beginning of the third dactyl, as—

But these hexameters admit of irregularities in the same manner as the common English measures of which we have spoken. We may have dissyllable feet instead of trissyllable in any place in the line; thus in the fourth—

In the third—

In the second—

In the first—

We may also have a dissyllable for the fifth foot—

But this irregularity disturbs the dactylic character of the verse more than the like substitution in any other place. So long as we have a dactyl in the fifth place, the dactylic character remains. Thus, even if we make all the rest dissyllables—

But if the fifth foot also be a dissyllable, the measure becomes trochaic.

Supposing the dactylic character to be retained, we may have dissyllables not in one place only, but in several, as we have seen is the case in the more common English dactylics. Now, the metre thus produced corresponds with the heroic verse hexameters of the Greek and Latin languages; except in this, that the English dissyllable feet are not exactly spondees. The Greek and Latin hexameters admit of dactyls and spondees indiscriminately, except that the fifth foot is regularly a dactyl, and the sixth a spondee or trochee. Also, the regular cÆsura of the Greek and Latin hexameters occurs in the beginning of the third foot, as in the English hexameters above given.

I think I have now shown that, without at all deviating from the common forms of English metre, and their customary liberties, we arrive at a metre which represents the classical hexameters, with this difference only, that the spondees are replaced by trochees. And this substitution is a necessary change; it results from the alternation of strong and weak syllables, which is a condition of all English versification.

And thus I have, I conceive, established my second point; that hexameters, exactly representing those of Greek and Latin verse, may grow out of purely English habits of versification.

But at the same time, I allow that classical scholars do read and write English hexameters with a recollection of those which they are familiar with in Greek and Latin; and that they have a disposition to identify the rhythm of the ancient and the modern examples, which leads them to treat English hexameters differently from other forms of English verse. This gives rise to some particularities of English hexameters, of which I may have a few words to say hereafter. In the mean time, I subscribe myself, your obedient

M.L.