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ENGLISH HEXAMETERS:

MR. DART'S TRANSLATION OF THE ILIAD.'

WE have here an English hexameter version of Homer's Iliad, half of which is now given us and the other half promised.

It is plain that such a performance has to fight its way to acceptance through strong adverse opinions. The Dean of Canterbury, allowing that the hexameter, as the mode of translating Homer, has every consideration in its favour but one, adds: "Still, the objection against the hexameter is, in my opinion, a fatal one. It " is not an English metre, and it never will be. All that has been done to naturalize "it has entirely failed. The scholar can read it and enjoy it, but then it is on "account of his knowledge of it in Greek and Latin. But the merely English "reader can make nothing of it." Dr. Alford's authoritative dictum, that "it is not an English metre, and it never will be," might strike with dismay Mr. Dart and others who, like him, have attempted or are attempting to give Homer to the English reader in the measure of the original, if he had not given his reasons for this prophecy. But probably Mr. Dart knows, as all who have read English hexameters without prejudice, and noted their effect upon other readers and hearers, know, that the facts are altogether at variance with Dr. Alford's statement. So far from all attempts to naturalize this measure having failed, it has been employed in several original poems which have very recently appeared, and which are very popular " Evangeline," "The Bothie of Toper-na-Fuosich," and "Miles Standish"-besides innumerable translations from the German, and translations of part of Homer, which have had many admirers. So far from its being "the scholar who can read it and enjoy it," and this on account of his knowledge of it in Greek and Latin, it is precisely the scholar who will not enjoy or tolerate it; and who, rejecting the best specimens of it (for instance, "Evangeline"), because they do not conform to Greek and Latin rules, demands a kind of hexameter in English which mere English ears will not tolerate. It is this demand "of the scholar" for "Virgilian" hexameters which has, from the time of Sydney and Spenser to the present time, prevented this measure being accepted by the mere English reader, as it is accepted by the mere German reader since the time of Klopstock. So far from its being true that the merely English reader can make nothing of it, the merely English reader-ladies, and children even, who have a feeling for rhythm, and who have not the prejudices or the biases of "the scholar" to prevent themread hexameters as readily as other kinds of verse, and write them as well. So far, therefore, Mr. Dart has nothing to fear from Dr. Alford's argument, however much he may be in danger of failure from having to encounter the prejudices which the Dean's dictum expresses; and, it may be, from not having himself got quite rid of those prejudices.

How strong these prejudices are we may learn further from a clever article in a highly respected contemporary.2

The writer of this article quotes a passage of the Iliad translated by our late lamented Dr. Hawtrey-"Helen on the Walls of Troy;" and he adds, "Now, I admit "that there is a certain grace here, even in the versification, and that for ten or "twelve lines it is not an unpleasant kind of canter; but I doubt whether a dozen "of the same would be agreeable." Now, I think we could not have a clearer proof how much the dislike to English hexameters arises from the fastidiousness of the classical scholar; for here is one such judge who, unable to find fault with these 1 The Iliad of Homer, in English Hexameter Verse," by J. Henry Dart, M.A. 2 Fraser's Magazine, June, 1861, p. 707.

And yet he might eleven lines, is sure that he would be tired with a dozen more. have known that the same accomplished scholar who wrote these translated into lines as good as these a great part of the Sixth Book of the Iliad; and he might have tried how many of them he could bear to read. He might have known that Mr. Lockhart, a writer in fineness of ear inferior to none, had translated, perhaps even better than Dr. Hawtrey, the Parting of Hector and Andromache; and had translated also into hexameters (in Blackwood's Magazine for 1837), the First and the Last Books of the Iliad. (The signature N. N. T. denotes John Gibson Lockhart.) That the ear of the merely English reader is not sickened by a long course of such verses, is seen in the popularity of "Evangeline," and especially of "The Bothie of Toper-na-Fuosich," which continues to please, notwithstanding that many of the lines are of a most barbarous and dissonant kind, suggested apparently by the author's love of the grotesque. Even the writer in Fraser himself allows this, for he gives this couplet to Longfellow :

"Longfellow most pleases me: no trouble his quantity gives me,

Each verse bounding along like a ship that bounds through the waters.”

But, in opposition to hexameters of this kind, which read themselves, he puts what he calls the "Virgilian measure," of which he gives this example:

1-0 lis: accent,

"Virgil my model is: accent, cæsura, division,

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His practice regulates: his laws my quantity obeyeth."

Now these verses do not read themselves, because they require us to say accent, practice, whereas the natural pronunciation is accent, practice. Such hexameters are not acceptable to the ordinary English ear, and are only tolerable to those who have been accustomed to force the accent in order to mark the quantity, as schoolboys are often taught to do.

I speak of the accent of modern English pronunciation as representing the quantity of the ancient measures, and so we must speak; for the modern ear (except by artificial classical training) does not recognise any versification except that which depends essentially upon accent, and can only recognise the ancient rhythms and measures by substituting accent for quantity. It is in vain, then, that J.S. says to the writers of English hexameters :

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"Yours on accents false goes hobbling. Vain your endeavour

Long to distinguish from short: long or short is all one to us English.”

The hexametrist answers: "That is perfectly true, so far as the essence of verse "is regarded. We do not want to distinguish long from short, in order that the verse should be verse, hexameter, or other." But we have need to distinguish long from short, in order to make our verses strong, smooth, light, instead of feeble, rough, heavy; and this, in other measures quite as much as in the hexameters. Thus, if we take Mr. Arnold's own example, which is not at all a happy application of his theory, the first line is :

"So shone forth in the front of Troy by the bed of Xanthus."

It cannot be denied that front of and bed of, two trochees which do duty for the spondees of the classical hexameter, are feeble, in consequence of the extreme lightness of the second syllable of each. The verse is a verse, but a bad verse.

At every step of discussion on this subject we are reminded how it has been entangled by the attempts made to identify modern hexameters, which must proceed by accent, with ancient hexameters, which were founded on quantity. I have said,

"the trochees which do duty for spondees," for we cannot have spondees as a regular element of the verse, though we may have spondees, or something very near to spondees, interspersed occasionally with good effect. But verse implies alternation of strong and weak syllables; and hence a series of spondees would not be verse; except indeed that they would have an alternate stress, arising from the musical accent, as a series of equal notes in music would have a rhythm arising from the accent which falls in the beginning of each bar. But in general, in English verse, trochees do duty for spondees. Yet in hexameters the trochee is still so used as to be, in the general balance of rhythm, the equivalent of the dactyl; and thus its weak syllable is to be equivalent to the two weak syllables of the dactyl And when the second syllable of trochees is very light, the line does not cease to be a hexameter line (for the six accents or strong syllables make it so), but it becomes a bad and feeble line.

It used to be said that we cannot have hexameters in English, because we have no spondees. To which it was answered, that we can have abundant spondees, as, for instance :

66 Tityrus, blest youth, lies in the broad shade under a green tree."

But that in our modern verse it is not well to use such spondees regularly, as I have said; and that in reading ancient verse rhythmically, no less than modern verse, we lay a stress on the first syllable of the foot, and thus make it a trochee.

The writer to whom I refer says further of the English hexameters, to which he gives his unwilling commendation, "I deny altogether that the metrical movement has any resemblance whatever to that of the Greek lines." To this denial I do not know what we can answer, except that to us, and to the writer of the English lines, and to all the other persons who have written English hexameters, and to those who have admired them, who are no small number, the metrical movement of the Greek (as we read it) and of the English is the same. I should like to have the experiment made by reading the two passages to an English woman, who, with no preconceived notions about feet and pauses, and accents and quantities, had a good ear for verse; or to a foreigner who, having accented verse in his own language, understood neither Greek nor English.

But the writer, further to illustrate his meaning, gives a translation of the same passage in blank verse, and says: "I should expect that" it "would give anybody "who was not acquainted with the Greek measure a much better idea of what it is "like to me." Now there is a clear and broad difference between iambic verse (or blank verse) and dactylic verse, which I should expect would strike any one except the writer of whom we are speaking. It has struck a writer in the Times, on this subject, who thus speaks: "It makes all the difference in the world in "the spirit and motion of a verse whether its accentuation is at the beginning or at the end of the feet. It is impossible to give to the iambics the liveliness "and rapidity of dactyls or trochees. It is impossible to give to pure dactyls "the solemnity and weight of the iambics."

66

And hence the gait of all hexameters, Greek, Latin, German, or English, if there be any considerable proportion of dactyls in them, must be susceptible of being described as "a canter," which the writer, as we have seen, applies as if it were something peculiar to this measure in English. In our hexameters, it is absolutely necessary to the essence of the verse that it shall begin with a long, that is, with a strong syllable. Southey, in the preface to his "Vision of Judgment,' theoretically denies this; but practically, in the poem itself, he has not introduced more than four or five examples of his perverse doctrine, whatever other faults may be found in that unfortunate experiment.

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It must appear, from the facts which I have adduced, to which many more may

1 Times, October 28, 1861.

be added, that there is an extensive and growing conviction that Homer ought to If this be done, if the verses run easily, be translated into English hexameters. the English be good, and the version faithful, such a translation may reasonably expect to obtain a currency which will disprove, by the fact, all assertions and prophecies that the hexameter is not an English measure, and never will be. We, therefore, look with great interest on all attempts at such a performance, and we turned to Mr. Dart's essay with goodwill, as well as with curiosity. We will attempt to give our readers some notion of the merits and defects of the work. I will take a well-known passage in the First Book, and give Lockhart's and Mr. Dart's translations; and first Lockhart :

"Then did Achilles begin to reproach Agamemnon Atrides'

Hotly with venomous words, for as yet unappeas'd was his anger.
Bloated with wine! having eyes like a dog, but the heart of a she-deer!
Never with harness on back to be first when the people were arming,
Never in dark ambuscade to lie with the few and the fearless

Courage exalted thy soul: this seems to thee courtship of death-doom;
Truly 'tis better by far, in the wide-spread Danaid leaguer,
Robbing of guerdon achiev'd whosoe'er contradicts thee in presence.
People-devouring king! O fortunate captain of cowards!

Else, Agamemnon, to-day would have witness'd the last of thy outrage;
But I proclaim it before thee, and great is the oath that shall bind it.
Now by this rod, which can never put forth a twig or a leaflet,
Since it was parted for aye from the root of its growth in the mountains,
Never to germinate more, in the hour when the knife of the woodman
Sever'd the bark and the sap: we, the chiefs that administer judgment,
Guarding the laws of the gods, as a sign to the sons of Achaia,
Bear it in hand-upon this do I swear, and severe is the sanction," &c.

This speech Mr. Dart thus renders :

"Dog as thou art in face; tame at heart as the deer of the forest;

Sot of a king!-when wert thou ever seen 'mid the braves of Achaia,
Arm'd in the battle's van; or in the more perilous contest,

Winning the spoils of the foe? Not for thee such uncertain encounters;
Thou lovest safer plunder, the plunder of friends, not of foemen-
(a) To range the wide camp of Achaia, and pilfer from those that oppose thee;
(a) A king that preys on his people-a king that rules over dastards;—

Were they not such, Atrides, thy pride had ere this been abated!
(a) But hear me now, O king, and mark the great oath I am swearing!—
E'en by this very sceptre, which, stripped of its leaves and its branches,
Never to know them again, left its parent stem in the mountains,
Never again to bud forth; for the cold, keen steel has dissever'd
Leaves and shoots and bark: and thus do the sons of Achaia,

(a) E'en they who guard the right, and enforce the will of the Highest,

Bear it as sign of sway; ay! deep is the oath I am swearing ;"-&c.

I think we may allow that in this passage Mr. Dart's version is more simple and direct, and therefore more Homeric, than that of his predecessor. But there are in his versification some faults of the kind, which, as I have mentioned, are most intolerable; namely, lines beginning with a light syllable, such as the four lines marked (a). The reader will perceive that these are really hexameters only by omitting the first syllable; thus:

"Range the wide camp of Achaia, and pilfer from those that oppose thee;
King that preys on his people-a king that rules over dastards."

In some of these cases Mr. Dart, perhaps, meant to force the lines into a dactylic movement. Thus, perhaps, he intended us to read—

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"But hear me now, O king, and mark the great oath I am swearing!"

instead of the obvious mode of reading

"But hear me now, O king."

And in the same way, in the subsequent line, Mr. Dart may read

"E'en they who guard the right," &c.

though the obvious reading is

"E'en they who guard the right," &c.

But such forced readings are greatly to be avoided. It is the introduction of such harshnesses which, more than anything else, has contributed to the unpopularity of English hexameters. The lines ought to read themselves, as much in this as in other kinds of English verse. It would be unreasonable to say that the lines must absolutely and necessarily read themselves into the proper rhythm, because this condition cannot be satisfied in any kind of English rhythm. There are often, in all kinds of verse, lines of which two or more modes of accentuation are equally natural; and in many cases the mode of reading which the verse requires is none of these. This is occasionally the case in Milton's blank verse. It would be easy to adduce lines from him which require a severe forcing to make them verse at all. Still, this process of forcing the rhythm is very objectionable, and stands grievously in the way of the acceptance of any poetry in which it is much used. Hence we regret greatly that in one large class of words Mr. Dart has systematically employed it; or rather, has employed it very largely, yet not quite systematically. We cannot but think that this feature of Mr. Dart's translation will tend greatly to consign it to the class of failures, in spite of other merits which it may have. The class of words to which we refer, in which Mr. Dart most perseveringly forces the rhythm, is proper names. We find him beginning the operation very early in the poem. Thus, the natural English pronunciation of the word is Atrīdes, and so it should always be in verse. So Mr. D. often has it (7. 59)—

"Sure it were better, Atrides, that all the remains of the people." But he very frequently has the forced rhythm Atrides; thus

1. 7. “Atrides, king of men, and the godlike leader, Achilles."

7. 18. "Hear me, O Atrida, and ye warrior sons of Achaia."

Now, this mode of accent strikes the mere English reader as simply forced and unnatural; but the classical reader is reminded by it of the schoolboy's practice of scanning verses, in which he marks the long syllables by a stress of his voice, in order to prove to his master that he knows that they are long.

No doubt such a process of reading stands altogether in the way of an enjoyment of the poetical rhythm; and any scheme of versification which requires habitually such a kind of violence is not good verse, nor English verse at all.

Mr. Dart is so persevering an offender in this way that we must go a little further into this matter. The temptation to offend assails him especially when he has to do with quadri-syllabic proper names which begin with a dactyl, such as Telemachus, Talthybius, Eurybates. Now, the rule for the English pronunciation of such names is simple, universal, and generally received. If the penultimate is long in Greek, it is long in English; if the penultimate is short, the English word

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