(Memoir, vol. ii. p. 231.)
(Robinson Ellis: Poems of Catullus, LXI. 1871.)
Mr. Ellis's translations from Catullus are all "in the metres of the original," and are among the most interesting specimens of modern classical versifying. "Tennyson's Alcaics and Hendecasyllabics," he said in his Preface, "suggested to me the new principle on which I was to go to work. It was not sufficient to reproduce the ancient metres, unless the ancient quantity was reproduced also." Of special interest is the imitation of the "almost unapproachable" galliambic verse of the Attis (pp. 49-53):
As Mr. Ellis observes, the metre of Tennyson's Boadicea was modelled on this of Catullus. Compare also Mr. George Meredith's Phaëthon, "attempted in the galliambic measure":
(Swinburne: Sapphics, in Poems and Ballads.)
(Swinburne: Choriambics, in Poems and Ballads, Second Series, 1878.)
Swinburne's imitations of classical measures are frankly accentual, with no effort to introduce fixed quantities into English.
(Sir Philip Sidney: Dorus and Zelmane, in the Arcadia. ab. 1580.)
Sidney was evidently trying to write genuinely quantitative hexameters. Thus "of love," in the third line, may be regarded as a quantitative spondee (the o being followed by two consonants), although the of would not naturally be stressed. In like manner it is very possible that "pallace" was spelled with two l's in order to make the first syllable seem long.
Sidney's hexameters are the first in literary verse which have come down to us; but there must have been earlier efforts at least by the time of Ascham's Schoolmaster (1570), which vigorously attacked "our rude beggerly ryming, brought first into Italie by Gothes and Hunnes, ... and at last receyved into England by men of excellent wit in deede, but of small learning, and less judgement in that behalfe." (Arber Reprint, p. 145.) One hexameter distich by a contemporary and friend of Ascham's, Master Watson of Cambridge, is handed down to us by Webbe, as being "common in the mouthes of all men":
(Discourse of English Poetrie, p. 72.)
(Richard Stanyhurst: Vergil's Æneid, bk. iv. 1582.)
Stanyhurst's Vergil is one of the curiosities of Elizabethan literature, not only from its verse-form but from its spelling and diction. The translator declares himself a disciple of Ascham, in his antipathy to rimed verse; "What Tom Towly is so simple," he asks, "that wyl not attempt too bee a rithmoure?" In an address to the Learned Reader he explains his system of English quantitative prosody. In 1593 Stanyhurst's hexameters were severely noticed in a passage by Thomas Nash directed primarily against the classical versifying of Gabriel Harvey. "The hexamiter verse," said Nash, "I graunt to be a gentleman of an auncient house (so is many an English begger), yet this clyme of ours he cannot thrive in; our speech is too craggy for him to set his plough in; hee goes twitching and hopping in our language, like a man running upon quagmiers, up the hill in one syllable and down the dale in another, retaining no part of that stately smooth gate which he vaunts himselfe with among the Greeks and Latins.... Master Stannyhurst (though otherwise learned) trod a foule lumbring boystrous wallowing measure, in his translation of Virgil." (Works of Nash, Grosart edition, vol. ii. pp. 237, 238.)
Stanyhurst was also ridiculed by Joseph Hall, in the Satires of his Virgidemiarum (1597):
(Chalmers's English Poets, vol. v. p. 266.)
Compare the lines of Chapman, in his Hymn to Cynthia, where he says that
See also, in Arber's edition of Stanyhurst in the English Scholar's Library, an account of another work in hexameters, published anonymously in 1599: the First Booke of the Preservation of King Henry the VII. This writer admired Stanyhurst's effort, but desired "him to refile" his verses into more polished English:
In the same connection the writer tells us definitely what is to be hoped from the "trew kind of Hexametred and Pentametred verse." "First it will enrich our speach with good and significant wordes: Secondly it will bring a delight and pleasure to the skilfull Reader, when he seeth them formally compyled: And thirdly it will incourage and learne the good and godly Students, that affect Poetry, and are naturally enclyned thereunto, to make the like: Fourthly it will direct a trew Idioma, and will teach trew Orthography."[44]
(William Webbe: Vergil's First Eclogue, in A Discourse of English Poetrie. 1586.)
Webbe prefaces his hexameters with a reference to those made by Gabriel Harvey, and says: "I for my part, so farre as those examples would leade me, and mine owne small skyll affoorde me, have blundered upon these fewe; whereinto I have translated the two first Æglogues of Virgill: because I thought no matter of my owne invention, nor any other of antiquitye more fitte for tryal of thys thyng, before there were some more speciall direction, which might leade to a lesse troublesome manner of wryting." (Arber Reprint, p. 72.)
(William Taylor: Paraphrase of Ossian's Hymn to the Sun. 1796.)
When English hexameters were revived at the end of the eighteenth century, it was in good part under German influence. Bodmer, Klopstock, and Voss, followed later by Goethe, made the German hexameter popular; and William Taylor of Norwich, who in many ways helped to familiarize his countrymen with German literature, became interested in the form. In 1796, the year of Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea, he contributed to the Monthly Magazine an article called "English Hexameters Exemplified," in which occurred the paraphrase from Ossian here quoted. Taylor pointed out that the hexameter of the Germans was purely accentual. They were "obliged, by the scarceness of long vowels and the rifeness of short syllables in their language, to tolerate the frequent substitution of trochees for spondees in their hexameter verse; and they scan, like other modern nations, by emphasis, not by position." (Quoted in J. W. Robberds's Memoir of William Taylor of Norwich, vol. i. pp. 157 ff.) Most later writers of English hexameters have followed the line here indicated, and have frankly abandoned the effort to represent the quantities of classical prosody.
(Coleridge: Hymn to the Earth. 1799.)
Coleridge made several experiments in hexameters at this time, and planned, together with Southey, a long hexameter poem on Mohammed. To Wordsworth he sent an experiment of the same kind in a lighter vein:
(Wordsworth's Memoirs, quoted in Coleridge's Poems, Aldine edition, vol. ii. p. 307.)
Coleridge also translated from Schiller the well-known distich describing and exemplifying the elegiac verse of Ovid:
This distich, it is interesting to find, was revised by Tennyson so as to represent the measure quantitatively rather than accentually:
(Southey: A Vision of Judgment, ix. 1821.)
Southey followed the example of William Taylor in attempting to construct hexameters "which would be perfectly consistent with the character of our language, and capable of great richness, variety and strength," yet which should not profess to follow "rules which are inapplicable to our tongue." (Preface to Vision of Judgment, Southey's Works, ed. 1838, vol. x. p. 195.) [45] In the same Preface he briefly reviewed the history of earlier efforts to introduce the classical measures into English. It is to be feared that Southey's hexameters are to be counted among the worst of modern times.
(Longfellow: Evangeline, Part. I. 1847.)
Evangeline is undoubtedly the most popular and widely read poem in English hexameters, and may be said to have revived the vogue of the measure in the middle of the nineteenth century. Yet its metrical qualities have not pleased most careful critics. Matthew Arnold said that the reception which the poem met with indicated that the dislike for the metre "is rather among professional critics than among the general public. Yet," he went on to say, "a version of Homer in hexameters of the Evangeline type would not satisfy the judicious, nor is the definite establishment of this type to be desired." (On Translating Homer, Macmillan ed., p. 284.) Mr. Arnold had previously suggested that the "lumbering effect" of such hexameters as Longfellow's is "caused by their being much too dactylic"; more spondees should be introduced.
The editor of the Riverside edition of Evangeline remarks interestingly: "The measure lends itself easily to the lingering melancholy which marks the greater part of the poem. The fall of the verse at the end of the line and the sharp recovery at the beginning of the next will be snares to the reader, who must beware of a jerking style of delivery.... A little practice will enable one to acquire that habit of reading the hexameter which we may liken, roughly, to the climbing of a hill, resting a moment on the summit, and then descending the other side."
Longfellow's hexameters were criticised most severely by his countryman, Edgar Poe. Poe denied the possibility of any adequate representation of the classical hexameter in English, largely because of the impossibility of using English spondees. The only genuine hexameters he knew, he declared, were some he had himself made, running:
(See Poe's Works, ed. Stedman and Woodberry, vol. vi. p. 104.)
Another interesting American experiment in hexameters is found in the Home Pastorals of Bayard Taylor (1869-1874). Taylor modeled his verses after those of the Germans, particularly Goethe's in Hermann und Dorothea. See, for example, the opening lines of November:
(Arthur Hugh Clough: The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich. 1848.)
Clough's hexameters are quite unlike any others in English poetry, both in their metrical quality and in their use for serio-comic verse. As Matthew Arnold observed, they are "excessively, needlessly rough," but their free, garrulous effect has a charm of its own. Clough also wrote some hexameters intended to be strictly quantitative. (For a detailed criticism of the verse of the Bothie, see Robert Bridges's Milton's Prosody, 1901 ed., Appendix J.)
It was Clough's hexameters, together with some "English Hexameter Translations" by Dr. Hawtrey and Mr. Lockhart (1847), that chiefly encouraged Matthew Arnold to believe that the measure might be well adapted to a translation of Homer. "The hexameter, whether alone or with the pentameter, possesses a movement, an expression, which no metre hitherto in common use amongst us possesses, and which I am convinced English poetry, as our mental wants multiply, will not always be content to forego." (Ib., p. 210.) Mr. James Spedding replied to Mr. Arnold's suggestion, from the point of view of the classical scholar, urging that only hexameters purely quantitative could properly represent those of Vergil. He illustrated his views by an amusing "hexametrical dialogue," conducted alternately in Vergilian measure and "in that of Longfellow." Of the former are the lines:
(James Spedding: Reviews and Discussions, 1879. p. 327.)
Arnold, however, wisely declined to be led into a discussion of the relations of accent and quantity in English. "All we are here concerned with," he said, "is the imitation, by the English hexameter, of the ancient hexameter in its effect upon us moderns.... The received English type, in its general outlines, is, for England, the necessary given type of this metre; it is by rendering the metrical beat of its pattern, not by rendering the accentual beat of it, that the English language has adapted the Greek hexameter.... I look with hope towards continued attempts at perfecting and employing this rhythm; but my belief in the immediate success of such attempts is far less confident than has been supposed." (See the whole passage, On Translating Homer, pp. 275-284.)
The hexameters of Dr. Hawtrey, quoted by Arnold, are these:
(From English Hexameter Translations, p. 242.)
Arnold also illustrated his doctrine in some hexameters of his own, which have not usually been regarded as a happy experiment. They run in part as follows:
(Ib., p. 234.)
Tennyson evidently viewed with small respect these various efforts to render Homer in English hexameters. See his lines beginning:
(In Quantity: Hexameters and Pentameters.)
Compare the amusing lines of Walter Savage Landor:
(English Hexameters, in The Last Fruit off an Old Tree.)
In like manner Mr. Swinburne says: "I must say how inexplicable it seems to me that Mr. Arnold, of all men, should be a patron of English hexameters. His own I have tried in vain to reduce by scansion into any metrical feet at all; they look like nothing on earth, and sound like anapests broken up and driven wrong.... And at best what ugly bastards of verse are these self-styled hexameters! how human tongues or hands could utter or could write them except by way of burlesque improvisation I could never imagine, and never shall." (Essays and Studies, p. 163.) From this condemnation Mr. Swinburne excepts only the hexameters of Dr. Hawtrey, "but that is simply a graceful interlude of pastime."
See also the essay called "Remarks on English Hexameters," in the Horæ Hellenicæ of Professor John Stuart Blackie.
(Charles Kingsley: Andromeda. 1858.)
Kingsley believed in the possibility of representing the quantitative verse of classical poetry in English, and at the same time holding to genuinely English rhythm.[46] Thus he tried to introduce more real spondees into his hexameters than Longfellow and others had done. Compare such a line as Longfellow's—
with Kingsley's—
In the former the dissyllabic feet are in no sense spondees; in the latter there is an effort to fill them with genuinely long syllables.
(William Watson: Hymn to the Sea, ii.)
Here the alternate lines represent the "pentameter" of the Latin elegiac verse, where the light syllables were omitted at the cesura and the end of the line.
(William Johnson Stone: Translation of Odyssey, vi. 85 ff., in The Use of Classical Measures in English. 1899.)
Mr. Stone, like the Elizabethan classical versifiers, seeks to write purely quantitative verse in English, and, so far from aiming at the same time to preserve the rhythm of the usual English hexameter, he regards the clash between accent and quantity as a beauty rather than a defect. The verses he intends to be read "with the natural accent unimpaired," the reader listening for the regular quantities at the same time.
The views of Mr. Stone on the nature of English accent and quantity are perhaps unique among modern writers on the subject. "The ordinary unemphatic English accent is exactly a raising of pitch, and nothing more," as in Greek. "The accent of emphasis is something quite different in character from the ordinary accent." To those who insist that to them the second syllable of carpenter is distinctly short, Mr. Stone replies: "You are associating yourselves by such an admission with the vulgar actors of Plautus rather than the educated readers of Virgil;"—a truly terrible charge! Mr. Stone gives an interesting critical history of earlier efforts to introduce classical measures into English. His monograph is reprinted, but without the specimen translation, as the second part of the 1901 edition of Robert Bridges's Milton's Prosody.
For further discussion of the relations of classical and English prosody, and of accent and quantity in English, see Schipper, vol. i. pp. 21-27; A. J. Ellis: article in the Transactions of the Philological Society, 1875-1876; T. D. Goodell: article on "Quantity in English Verse," in the Proceedings of the American Philological Society, 1885; Edmund Gurney: The Power of Sound, pp. 429-439; J. M. Robertson: Appendix to New Essays towards a Critical Method, 1897; and the discussion in Part Three of the present volume.
[42] Puttenham's treatise on English poetry, which followed Webbe's (1589), and was the most thorough treatment of the subject written in the Elizabethan period, also discussed the "reformed versifying," but with less respect. The chapter is entitled: "How if all maner of sodaine innovations were not very scandalous, specially in the lawes of any langage or arte, the use of the Greeke and Latine feete might be brought into our vulgar Poesie, and with good grace inough." (Arber Reprint of The Arte of English Poesie, p. 126.) Puttenham seems to see the relations of quantity and accent somewhat more clearly than most of his contemporaries, and while he gives rules for adapting English words to quantitative prosody, he is disposed to think that "peradventure with us Englishmen it be somewhat too late to admit a new invention of feete and times that our forefathers never used nor never observed till this day" (p. 132).
[43] Campion's Observations are reprinted in Mr. Bullen's edition of his poems, and also in Rhys's Literary Pamphlets, vol. i. His attack on the customary English rimed verse was answered by the poet laureate, Samuel Daniel, who published in the same year (1602) his Defence of Ryme against a Pamphlet entituled Observations in the Art of English Poesie. "Wherein is demonstratively prooved that Ryme is the fittest harmonie of words that comports with our Language." Daniel struck at the root of all the principles of the classical versifiers,—the supreme authority of the classics. "We are the children of nature as well as they," he exclaims with reference to the ancients. "It is not the observing of Trochaiques nor their Iambiques, that will make our writings ought the wiser." And he expounds the English accentual verse-system with clearness and vigor. This essay of Daniel's may be said to mark the end, if it did not bring about the end, of the Elizabethan experiments in classical metres. For other contemporary criticism of the effort, see under the following section, on the Hexameter.
[44] On the history of the English hexameter, see the admirable account in Mayor's Chapters on English Metre, 2d ed., chap. xv.
[45] Southey's effort was attacked by the Rev. S. Tillbrook, Fellow of Peterhouse, in a pamphlet entitled "Historical and Critical Remarks upon the Modern Hexameters, and upon Mr. Southey's Vision of Judgment." To this Southey replied in the second edition of his poem, saying to Mr. Tillbrook: "You try the measure by Greek and Latin prosody: you might as well try me by the Laws of Solon, or the Twelve Tables. I have distinctly stated that the English hexameter is not constructed upon those canons." He further appealed to the success of the hexameter in Germany, and concluded: "I am glad that I have made the experiment, and quite satisfied with the result. The critics who write and talk are with you: so I dare say are the whole posse of schoolmasters. The women, the young poets, and the docile bairns are with me." (Op. cit., Preface to the Present Edition, pp. xix, xxi.)
[46] For Kingsley's exposition of his theories, see the Letters and Memories, edited by his wife, vol. i. pp. 338-344. He declined to yield to "trocheism one atom. My ear always demands the equivalent of the 'lost short syllable.'" And again: "Every argument you bring convinces me more and more that the theory of our prosody depending on accent is false, and that it really is very nearly identical with the Greek.... I am glad to hear (being a lazy man) that I have more license than I wish for; but I do think that, with proper care, you may have as many spondees, without hurting the rhythm, in English as you have in Greek, and my ear is tortured by a trochee instead.... I must try for Homer's average of a spondee a line."
A number of artificial lyrical forms, originating in the ingenuity of the mediæval Provençal poets, were adopted by the Middle English imitators of the Romance lyrists, and were revived with no little vigor in the Victorian period. Chief among the influential models for these forms, in early times, were the poems of Machault (1284-1377), Deschamps (1328-1415), Froissart (1337-1410), and Villon (1431-1485). Again in the seventeenth century such forms as the rondeau were revived in France by Voiture (1598-1648), but with little effect in England. Finally, in the nineteenth century, the forms were reintroduced by M. Théodore de Banville, and later into England by Mr. Lang, Mr. Austin Dobson, Mr. Gosse, and others. For the history of these fashions in outline, see the admirable introduction to Mr. Gleeson White's Ballades and Rondeaus (1893); also Mr. Andrew Lang's Lays and Lyrics of Old France (1872); Mr. Austin Dobson's "Note on some Foreign Forms of Verse," in the collection of Latter Day Lyrics (1878); and an article by Mr. Edmund Gosse in the Cornhill Magazine, July, 1877.
Says Mr. Dobson: "It may be conceded that the majority of the forms now in question are not at present suited for ... the treatment of grave or elevated themes. What is modestly advanced for some of them ... is that they may add a new charm of buoyancy,—a lyric freshness,—to amatory and familiar verse, already too much condemned to faded measures and out-worn cadences. Further, ... that they are admirable vehicles for the expression of trifles or jeux d'esprit. They have also a humbler and obscurer use. If, to quote the once-hackneyed, but now too-much-forgotten maxim of Pope—