Here again I put an extreme case, in order to be well understood; but the general fact is as I give it – that, comparatively, the French have no accentuation. And there can be nothing worth the name of verse without. Therefore, the French have no verse worth the name – which is the fact, put in sufficiently plain terms. Their iambic rhythm so superabounds in absolute spondees, as to warrant me in calling its basis spondaic; but French is the only modern tongue which has any rhythm with such basis; and even in the French, it is, as I have said, unintentional.

Admitting, however, the validity of my suggestion, that the spondee was the first approach to verse, we should expect to find, first, natural spondees (words each forming just a spondee) most abundant in the most ancient languages; and, secondly, we should expect to find spondees forming the basis of the most ancient rhythms. These expectations are in both cases confirmed.

Of the Greek hexameter, the intentional basis is spondaic. The dactyls are the variation of the theme. It will be observed that there is no absolute certainty about their points of interposition. The penultimate foot, it is true, is usually a dactyl; but not uniformly so; while the ultimate, on which the ear lingers, is always a spondee. Even that the penultimate is usually a dactyl may be clearly referred to the necessity of winding up with the distinctive spondee. In corroboration of this idea, again, we should look to find the penultimate spondee most usual in the most ancient verse; and, accordingly, we find it more frequent in the Greek than in the Latin hexameter.

But besides all this, spondees are not only more prevalent in the heroic hexameter than dactyls, but occur to such an extent as is even unpleasant to modern ears, on account of monotony. What the modern chiefly appreciates and admires in the Greek hexameter, is the melody of the abundant vowel sounds. The Latin hexameters really please very few moderns – although so many pretend to fall into ecstasies about them. In the hexameters quoted, several pages ago, from Silius Italicus, the preponderance of the spondee is strikingly manifest. Besides the natural spondees of the Greek and Latin, numerous artificial ones arise in the verse of these tongues on account of the tendency which inflection has to throw full accentuation on terminal syllables; and the preponderance of the spondee is farther insured by the comparative infrequency of the small prepositions which we have to serve us instead of case, and also the absence of the diminutive auxiliary verbs with which we have to eke out the expression of our primary ones. These are the monosyllables whose abundance serve to stamp the poetic genius of a language as tripping or dactylic.

Now, paying no attention to these facts, Sir Philip Sidney, Professor Longfellow, and innumerable other persons more or less modern, have busied themselves in constructing what they suppose to be »English hexameters on the model of the Greek.« The only difficulty was that (even leaving out of question the melodious masses of vowels) these gentlemen never could get their English hexameters to sound Greek. Did they look Greek? – that should have been the query; and the reply might have led to a solution of the riddle. In placing a copy of ancient hexameters side by side with a copy (in similar type) of such hexameters as Professor Longfellow, or Professor Felton, or the Frogpondian Professors collectively, are in the shameful practice of composing ›on the model of the Greek,‹ it will be seen that the latter (hexameters, not professors) are about one third longer to the eye, on an average, than the former. The more abundant dactyls make the difference. And it is the greater number of spondees in the Greek than in the English – in the ancient than in the modern tongue – which has caused it to fall out that while these eminent scholars were groping about in the dark for a Greek hexameter, which is a spondaic rhythm varied now and then by dactyls, they merely stumbled, to the lasting scandal of scholarship, over something which, on account of its long-leggedness, we may as well term a Feltonian hexameter, and which is a dactylic rhythm, interrupted, rarely, by artificial spondees which are no spondees at all, and which are curiously thrown in by the heels at all kinds of improper and impertinent points.

Here is a specimen of the Longfellownian hexameter.

 

Also the | church with | in was a | dorned for | this was the | season

In which the | young their | parents' | hope and the | loved ones of | Heaven |

Should at the | foot of the | altar re | new the | vows of their | baptism |

Therefore each | nook and | corner was | swept and | cleaned and the dust was |

Blown from the | walls and | ceiling and | from the | oil-painted | benches |

 

Mr. Longfellow is a man of imagination – but can he imagine that any individual, with a proper understanding of the danger of lock-jaw, would make the attempt of twisting his mouth into the shape necessary for the mission of such spondees as ›parents,‹ and ›from the,‹ or such dactyls as ›cleaned and the,‹ and ›loved ones of‹? ›Baptism‹ is by no means a bad spondee – perhaps because it happens to be a dactyl; – of all the rest, however, I am dreadfully ashamed.

But these feet – dactyls and spondees, all together – should thus be put at once into their proper position:

 

»Also, the church within was adorned; for this was the season in which the young, their parents' hope, and the loved ones of Heaven, should, at the foot of the altar, renew the vows of their baptism. Therefore each nook and corner was swept and cleaned; and the dust was blown from the walls and ceiling, and from the oil-painted benches.«

 

There! – That is respectable prose; and it will incur no danger of ever getting its character ruined by anybody's mistaking it for verse.

But even when we let these modern hexameters go, as Greek, and merely hold them fast in their proper character of Longfellownian, or Feltonian, or Frogpondian, we must still condemn them as having been committed in a radical misconception of the philosophy of verse. The spondee, as I observed, is the theme of the Greek line. Most of the ancient hexameters begin with spondees, for the reason that the spondee is the theme; and the ear is filled with it as with a burden. Now the Feltonian dactylics have, in the same way, dactyls for the theme, and most of them begin with dactyls – which is all very proper if not very Greek, – but, unhappily, the one point at which they are very Greek is that point, precisely, at which they should be nothing but Feltonian. They always close with what is meant for a spondee. To be consistently silly, they should die off in a dactyl.

That a truly Greek hexameter cannot, however, be readily composed in English, is a proposition which I am by no means inclined to admit. I think I could manage the point myself. For example:

 

Do tell! | when may we | hope to make | men of sense | out of the | Pundits

Born and brought | up with their | snouts deep | down in the | mud of the | Frog pond? |

Why ask? | who ever | yet saw | money made | out of a | fat old |

Jew, or | downright | upright | nutmegs | out of a | pine-knot? |

 

The proper spondee predominance is here preserved. Some of the dactyls are not so good as I could wish – but, upon the whole, the rhythm is very decent – to say nothing of its excellent sense.

 

 

Notes

1 Verse, from the Latin vertere, to turn, is so called on account of the turning or recommencement of the series of feet. Thus a verse, strictly speaking, is a line.