LECTURE XXIV.

ACCENTUATION AND DOUBLE RHYMES.

THE modes of consonance which may be, and by different nations have been, employed as essential elements of the poetical form, are very various. The prosody or metrical system of the classical languages is founded on quantity, that of modern literature on accentuation. Each system necessarily excludes the characteristic element of the other, not indeed from accidental coincidence, or altogether, from consideration in practice, but from theoretical importance as an ingredient in poetic measure. Quantity, as employed by the ancients, has been generally supposed to consist simply in the length or relative duration of different syllables in time of utterance. To us, mere quantity is so inappreciable, that we

The terms long and short, employed in popular English orthoepy, are usually wholly misapplied. Most of our vowels have two long sounds, and the corresponding short sounds are often expressed not by the same, but by differ ent vowels. The propriety of the terms long and short, as truly descriptive ap pellations, expressive, simply, of relative duration in time, is, to say the least, very questionable, even when applied to cases where the same character is em ployed for both. It is not true that short sounds, simply by a more leisurely utterance, necessarily pass into long ones, and vice versa, for if so, the short vowels of a slow delivery would be the long ones of a rapid pronunciation, which is by no means the fact. An attentive examination of the position of the organs

cannot comprehend how it could be made the basis of a metrical system. It is difficult to believe that, with any supposable sensibility of ear to the flow of time, a prosody could have been founded on that single accident of sound, and we cannot resist the persuasion that there entered into ancient prosody some yet undiscovered element, some peculiarity of articulation or intonation, that was as influential as the mere temporal length of vowels in giving a rhythmical character to a succession of syllables which, with the supposed ancient accentuation, is, to our ears, undistinguishable from prose.

Although, for want of appropriate native terms, we employ Latin and Greek designations of feet and measures, yet our modern accentual rhythm is in no sense an equivalent of the ancient temporal prosody, as it has sometimes been considered, but it is its representative, and, like some other representatives, very far from being a truthful expression of the primary constituency for which it answers. It is for this reason that every attempt to naturalize the classical metres in English verse, except in the very disputable case of the hexameter, has proved a palpable failure, and is in fact a delusion, because, from the want of parity between accent and quantity, they cannot strike the ear alike, and therefore the eye alone, or the fingers which count off the feet, can find any resemblance between the ancient metre and the modern.

of speech will show that between longs and shorts there is, generally at least, a difference in quality as well as in time. Syllables long by position, indeed, re. quire more time for their utterance than ordinary short syllables, because they contain a greater number of successive articulations, but here, in modern orthoepy, the length is a property of the syllable, not of the vowel alone. How far, and in what way, position actually modified the pronunciation of the vowel itself, in ancient prosody, cannot now be determined, and of course we do not know whether in that case prosodical length belonged to the vowel, more or less, than in modern articulation.

Indeed, what we imitate is not the original, but a figment which we have fabricated and set up in the place of it.

Simmias of Rhodes, and other half-forgotten ancient triflers, wrote short pieces in verses of different lengths, arranged in such succession that, when written down, the poem presented to the eye the form of an egg, an altar, a twobladed battle-axe, or a pair of wings, and the likeness here was as real between the poem and the object, as it is between modern and ancient bexameters or Horatian metres.

The frequent coincidence between Latin prosodical quantity and the Italian accent in the same words, and other points of apparent similarity in articulation, authorize the belief that in sound, these two languages resemble each other more nearly than any other pair of ancient and modern tongues, and of course, if ancient metres were capable of reproduction anywhere, it should be in Italy. Nevertheless, the attempt has hardly been made, except by way of experi ment, and then with no such results as to encourage repetition.* What we call ancient metres have proved best adapt

The Latin metres were fashioned upon, and borrowed from, those of the Greeks, and the copy may be supposed to have been, in its essential features, closely conformable to the original; but it is a remarkable fact, that in the pronunciation of the two languages which now represent the Greek and the Latin, there is a difference that seems to point to a corresponding distinction in the orthoepy of the ancient mother tongues. In Italian, not uniformly, certainly, but in the great majority of cases, the accent, or stress of voice, falls on the syllable which, in the corresponding Latin word, was prosodically long. In modern Greek, on the other hand, no such coincidence between the present accent and the ancient quantity exists, and the accentuation is absolutely independent of the ancient metrical value of the syllables in the same words. Hence, though modern Italian poetry has assumed a new character by the adoption of new metres, and especially by the fetters of rhyme, yet there is very possibly some resemblance between the rhythms of modern and ancient Roman bards, whereas modern Greek measures, which are accentual and not temporal, and the prosodical movement of ancient Hellenic poetry seem to have nothing in common. The partial resemblance between the old Latin quantity and the new Italian ac

ed to languages whose articulation differs most widely from that of the classic tongues, and the success of these metres has been in the inverse ratio of their actual resemblance to the prosody from which they have taken their names. The more explosive the accentuation, the more numerous the consonants, the less clear and pure the vowel, the more tolerable the modern travesty of the ancient metre; and the hexameter has become naturalized in Germany, not because it is like, but because it is unlike, the classical verse whose name it bears, and therefore is suited to a language of a totally different orthocpical character.* The pentameter has also, but invita Minerva, been introduced into German, and the use of this most disagreeable and unmelodious of measures has, for an un-Germanic ear at least, spoiled what would otherwise be some of the finest poems in all the literature.†

centuation is one of the circumstances that serve to explain why, even after the introduction of modern rhymes and modern measures into Latin poetry, the classical metres were also kept up in medieval Latin, and both systems of prosody employed concurrently. It is true, that even after the first appearance of the accentual, or as the most important early form of it is called, the political metre of modern Greek, hexameters and other verses constructed after the ancient rules sometimes occur, but the co-existence of the two systems was much less general, and of briefer duration, in Greece than in Italy.

The greater proportion of unaccented syllables in German, renders that language better suited to the classical, and especially the dactylic, measures than the English. A literal translation from English into German occupies from a third to a fourth more space in letter-press in the latter than in the former. The number of words, from the resemblance between the two in syntactical movement, is about equal in a given period, and the accents do not differ much in frequency. The syllables in German contain, upon an average, more letters than in English, but the difference in this respect is not sufficient to account for the difference in the space occupied by the original, and by a version from one to the other. It is occasioned chiefly by the greater number of syllables in German, resulting from the greater proportion of augmentative inflections in its syntax.

The beauty of Schiller's Spaziergang, for instance, is sadly impaired by the halting movement of its verse, and the shock to the reader's nerves from the

The poetic measures of the Anglo-Saxon and the Scandinavian tongues are founded wholly on accentual rhythm, though the most ancient Gothic verses one by no means always capable of resolution into poetic feet.

The Ormulum, in many respects, one of the most interesting relics of Old-English poetic literature, is strictly metrical in its movement, and of great regularity in the structure of

sudden earthward plunge which Pegasus makes at the end of every alternate line. If any thing were wanting to prove that ancient prosody could not have been accentual, sufficient evidence might be found in its admission of a metre which accentual scanning makes so repulsive.

The recent experiments in the way of reviving the hexameter in English have certainly been much more successful than those of the sixteenth century, but I believe there is little disposition to attempt to resuscitate the pentameter in English verse. It is surprising that so exquisite an ear as that of Spenser could content itself with such rhythms as those of his essays in classical metre, and we can hardly think him serious in offering such lines as these as specimens:

See yee the blindefolded pretie God, that feathered Archer,
Of Louers Miseries which maketh his bloodie Game?
Wote ye why, his Moother with a Veale hath couered his face?
Trust me, least he my Looue happely chaunce to beholde.

Spenser had as much difficulty in theory as in practice in reconciling accentual rhythm with classic quantity. "The accente," he says, in his letter to Harvey in Haslewood's collection, "sometime gapeth, and as it were yawneth illfavouredly, coming shorte of that it should, and sometime exceeding the measure of the Number, as in Carpenter, the middle sillable being vsed shorte in speache, when it shall be read long in verse, seemeth like a lame Gosling, that draweth one legge after hir: and Heauen, being vsed shorte as one sillable, when it is in verse, stretched out with a Diastole, is like a lame Dogge that holdes up one legge."

Among all the abortive attempts to present an ancient poem to modern readers in a form supposed to be analogous to its ancient shape, I know of none where the failure is more signal than in Newman's Homer. The "blind old man of Scio's rocky isle" is reported to have earned a precarious livelihood by chanting, on festive occasions, the ballads which Pisistratus long after collected and arranged in the form in which we now possess them, as a consecutive series of poems. Mr. Newman has attempted to give them, in an English version, a form corresponding to that in which they were originally composed and delivered. Had this translation appeared anonymously, the obvious adaptation of the metre to our national melody would have led to the conclusion that it could have had