QUANTITY AND ACCENT.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR."] Sin,—Will you allow one of your readers to say that the verses of " Valerius," which your reviewer quotes as unsurpassed speci- mens of their metre, are to others, in spite of their elegance of style, absolutely excruciating, if held up as types of any measure known in heaven above or on earth beneath ?
The fact is (and I have bestowed some thought upon the sub- ject) that the attempt to reproduce a metre based on quantity, in a language of which the pronunciation is based upon accent— quantity forming only a quite subordinate and generally unper- ceived element—is about as rational as the search of the alchemists after the universal solvent, which nothing but the horn of the unicorn could ever hold.
Not one out of a hundred among the most classically educated Englishmen has, I verily believe, the slightest sense of a really quantitative metrical system. How can he ? He never hears a line of Greek or Latin quantitative verse which is not first trans- posed into accentual. No Latin could have listened to the rhythm of the gist foot of the "Budd, as pronounced by English lips, without stopping his ears. No power on earth can prevent the i of virum, pronounced as y, from being quantitatively long ; and yet the Englishman is taught to look upon it as short.
, The only living clue we have, I believe, to the quantitative system of the ancients, or say, to narrow the inquiry, of the Romans, lies in the modern derivative languages of the Latin group. We shall find in these (though least prominently in the French) the two elements of length which present themselves in the Latin of the ancients,—lst, the intrinsic quantity of the vowel (particularly marked in Spanish) ; 2nd, the length imparted to the syllable by the accumulation or reduplication of consonants. Take only this last point, as being one referred to by your reviewer. It is impossible, from the experience of our own language, to under- stand why the reduplication of a consonant was held by the Romans to lengthen the syllable ; with us it shortens it ; sale, sally ; pate, patty ; Sue, Fanny. But listen to the Italian spal-l-e, to the Portuguese mat-t-o, to the French Fan-n-y, and it will be felt at once that owing to the distinct effect given to each consonant, the length of the syllable is really doubled, irreapec tively of the vowel. Hence it appears clearly that the' Latin quantitative system was on this point, as it might be shown to be on others, founded on entirely opposite principles to our own. The I is, if I mistake not, the only letter with us which will bear reduplication in some cases without shortening the syllable. It would be utterly impossible to pronounce happy, knotty, with a long vowel ; and we cannot lengthen the syllable by giving effect to both consonants without at once falling into a foreign pro- nunciation, hap-p-y, knot-t-y.
Curious, however, to say, the very one of the modern languages of the Latin family which has preserved least, I suppose, of the details of Roman pronunciation, is at the same time the one which I believe to have alone retained its quantitative system as a basis, —French. French stands singular amongst our modern languages in having obstinately rejected accent as a basis of pronunciation. It has accent, no doubt (Keltic, I believe, and of a type which is well reproduced by Mr. Tennyson in his Boadicea), but accent in French, as quantity in English, is a purely sub- ordinate element. The language is not accentual ; and hence, whilst the metres of England, Germany, modern Scandinavia, Spain, Portugal, Italy, modern Greece, are all either iden- tical or interchangeable, not one of them is capable of being reproduced in French ; the French metres themselves, on the other hand, being almost inappreciable by any other nation.* I hatie heard a French sailor, quite devoid of the classics, but who had knocked a good deal about the world, observe that English ivas " a sung language," adding, as terms of comparison, " like Italian or Romaic." The expression marks perfectly the difference to a Frenchman's ear of his own quantitative pronunciation from the accentual Systems of other nations.
Now, if your reviewer, or " Valerius " himself, will get any French professor, or other classically educated Frenchman, to read for him twenty lines of Homer or Virgil, he will, I believe, Obtain a perfectly correct idea of the quantitative rhythm of the ancient hexameter, and a sense of the utter impossibility of transferring that rhythm into our own tongue, which will cure him of all temptation to renew the experithent. Until he does so, I am perfectly aware that what 1 have been saying will be— Japanese to hint.
But this will not be the slightest reason for his eschewing from henceforth English hexameters, pentameters, sapphics, or whatever other forin of ancient metre his ear delights in, as transposed into his own familiar key of accent, from that of quantity, in which it was originally written. And there is nothing to hinder ,him, if he chooses, so long as he does not travel out of the former, froM trying to superadd to it some of the delicacies of the latter. He May, if he will, when the English ear requires only the mixture of accentual trochees with dactyls to form the hexameter, put himself to torture in fishing out true spondees. I hive indulged in such exercitations myself :—
Mighty and free, as a father of streams speeds onward to Ocean, Rolls old Homer's verse, glassing the earth and the sea.
But to what purpose? The genius of the language runs counter to the attempt, and even in the two lines above quoted the ear is better pleased with the trochaic accentuation Of the quantitative Spondees, " streams speed," " rolla old," " Homer's." No, let us remain content with our own accentual system of pronunciation, which gives to our language a rhythmic power equal to that of any, and superior to that of most other European nations ; let us cultivate that power to the utmost, whether by simple transfer of metres or transposition from any other key, but let us not imagine that we can force the very diapaaon of our language.—I am, Sir,
ONE WHO HAS DABBLED IN VERSE.
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