Infátuáte! óh that thou wért | lord to some other army—
for here the reader is required, not for any special advantage to himself, but _simply to save Mr Newman trouble_, to place the accent on the insignificant word _wert_, where it has _no business whatever_’. Thus to the flaw which Mr Arnold admits nine times in thirteen pattern lines, he shows no mercy in me, who have toiled through fifteen thousand. Besides, on _wert_ we are free at pleasure to place or not to place the accent; but in Mr Arnold’s _Bétween_, _Tó a_, etc., it is impossible or offensive.
To avoid a needlessly personal argument, I enlarge on the general question of hexameters. Others, scholars of repute, have given example and authority to English hexameters. As matter of curiosity, as erudite sport, such experiments may have their value. I do not mean to express indiscriminate disapproval, much less contempt. I have myself privately tried the same in Alcaics; and find the chief objection to be, not that the task is impossible, but that to execute it _well_ is too difficult for a language like ours, overladen with consonants, and abounding with syllables neither distinctly long nor distinctly short, but of every intermediate length. Singing to a tune was essential to keep even Greek or Roman poetry to true _time_; to the English language it is of tenfold necessity. But if _time_ is abandoned (as in fact it always is), and the prose accent has to do duty for the ictus metricus, the moral genius of the metre is fundamentally subverted. What previously was steady duplicate time (‘march-time’, as Professor Blackie calls it) vacillates between duplicate and triplicate. With Homer, a dactyl had nothing in it _more tripping_ than a spondee: a crotchet followed by two quavers belongs to as grave an anthem as two crotchets. But Mr Arnold himself (p. 55) calls the introduction of anapæsts by Dr Maginn into our ballad measure, ‘a detestable dance’: as in:
And scarcely hád shĕ bĕgún to wash, Ere shé wăs ăwáre ŏf thĕ grisly gash.
I will not assert that this is everywhere improper in the Odyssey; but no part of the Iliad occurs to me in which it is proper, and I have totally excluded it in my own practice. I notice it but once in Mr Gladstone’s specimens, and it certainly offends my taste as out of harmony with the gravity of the rest, viz.