I have been examining a book by the POET LAUREATE, in which that learned
and painstaking man puts forward for general acceptance a new theory and
a new practice of metre in English poetry. It seems that our verse is
accentual, whereas it ought to be quantitative--or it may be the other
way about; my brain is in such a whirl with it all that I can't be
certain which is right, but I am sure that one of them is, and so I
leave you to take your choice. Failing that, you can buy Dr. BRIDGES'
book, which is entitled _Ibant Obscuri_ (Oxford University Press), and
thus expresses my inmost convictions about our great official poet and
his followers. We are henceforth to write hexameters in English on an
entirely new plan, of which the result is that they lose all likeness to
any hexameters previously encountered on the slopes of Parnassus or
anywhere else and become something so blind and staggering and
dreadfully amorphous that the whole mind of the reader rises up in
revolt against them.
That, at any rate, is my condition at this moment after going through a
course of them. I notice that the reviewers have been a little shy of
these hexametric efforts. They have mostly described them as
"interesting experiments" and have applauded Dr. BRIDGES for his
adventurous industry and his careful scholarship, and thereafter they
have skirmished on the outskirts and have shown a disinclination to come
to grips with the LAUREATE on the main question whether these hexameters
are a success or a failure. Now I have no hesitation whatever in
admitting my metrical ignorance and at the same time in denouncing as a
fiasco the experiment of Dr. BRIDGES. I have spent some time in
struggling with his hexameters; I have attempted to track his dactyls to
their lair; I have followed up what I took to be his spondees, and I am
thankful to say that I have managed to survive.
Let me now give some examples, not composed, it is true, by the
LAUREATE, but by myself. This is not an unfair proceeding, for it will
serve to show the effect of _Ibant Obscuri_ on a mind not too obtuse. I
promise that the rules shall be observed. There shall be six feet in
each line, dactyls or spondees, and the fifth foot shall be a dactyl and
the sixth a spondee or a trochee. Are you ready? Go!
Apollo now came forth his course through the sky to fulfil;
In other words it was morning and most people got out of bed;
And fathers of families munched and grumbled at their breakfasts,
Denouncing their bacon and not to be mollified with their
Coffee or tea, as the case might be, and the housewives reproved them,
Saying 'twas impossible to control them with such an example.
Beyond the above I cannot go, but I must add that the lines are of the
most perfect metrical lucidity and the purest melody when compared with
some written by the LAUREATE in _Ibant Obscuri_.
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