_O Melibaeus, he was no man, but a God who releeude me:
Euer he shalbe my God: from this same Sheepcot his alters
Neuer, a tender lambe shall want, with blood to bedew them.
This good gift did he giue, to my steeres thus freelie to wander,
And to my selfe (thou seest) on pipe to resound what I listed._
_ib._ 50-56.
_Here no unwoonted foode shall grieue young theaues who be laded,
Nor the infections foule of neighbours flocke shall annoie them.
Happie olde man. In shaddowy bankes and coole prettie places,
Heere by the quainted floodes and springs most holie remaining.
Here, these quicksets fresh which lands seuer out fro thy neighbors
And greene willow rowes which Hiblae bees doo rejoice in,
Oft fine whistring noise, shall bring sweete sleepe to thy sences._
The following stanzas are from a Sapphic ode into which Webbe
translated, or as we should say, transposed the fourth Eclogue of
Spenser's _Sheepheardes Calendar_.
_Say, behold did ye euer her Angelike face,
Like to Phoebe fayre? or her heauenly hauour
And the princelike grace that in her remaineth?
haue yee the like seene?_
_Vnto that place Caliope dooth high her,
Where my Goddesse shines: to the same the Muser
After her with sweete Violines about them
cheerefully tracing._
_All ye Sheepheardes maides that about the greene dwell,
Speede ye there to her grace, but among ye take heede
All be Virgins pure that aproche to deck her,
dutie requireth._
_When ye shall present ye before her in place,
See ye not your selues doo demeane too rudely:
Bynd the fillets: and to be fine the waste gyrt
fast with a tawdryne._
_Bring the Pinckes therewith many Gelliflowres sweete,
And the Cullambynes: let vs haue the Wynesops,
With the Coronation that among the loue laddes
wontes to be worne much._
_Daffadowndillies all a long the ground strowe,
And the Cowslyppe with a prety paunce let heere lye.
Kyngcuppe and Lillies so beloude of all men
and the deluce flowre._
There are many faults in these verses; over quaintnesses of language,
constructions impossible in English, quantities of doubtful
correctness, harsh elisions, for Webbe has tried even elisions. Yet, if
I may trust my judgment, all of them can still be read with pleasure;
the sapphics may almost be called a success. This is even more true of
metres, where these faults are less perceptible or more easily avoided,
for instance, Asclepiads. Take the verses on solitariness, Arcadia, B.
II. fin.
_O sweet woods, the delight [o]f s(o)l(i)t[a]riness!
O how much I do like your solitariness!
Where man's mind hath a freed consideration
Of goodness to receive lovely direction._
or the hendecasyllables immediately preceding,
_Reason tell me thy minde, if here be reason,
In this strange violence, to make resistance,
Where sweet graces erect the stately banner._
It is obvious that a very little more trouble would have converted these
into very perfect and very pleasing poems. Had Sir Philip Sidney written
every asclepiad on the model of _Where man's mind hath a freed
consideration_, every hendecasyllable like _Where sweet graces erect the
stately banner_, the adjustment of accent and quantity thus attained
might, I think, have induced greater poets than he to make the
experiment on a larger scale. But neither he nor his contemporaries
were permitted to grasp as a principle a regularity which they sometimes
secured by chance; nor, so far as I am aware, have the various revivals
of ancient metre in this country or Germany in any case consistently
carried out the _whole_ theory, without which the reproduction is
partial, and cannot look for a more than partial success. Even the four
specimens given in the posthumous edition of Clough's poems, two of them
elegiac, one alcaic, one in hexameters, though professedly constructed
on a quantitative basis, and, in one instance (_Trunks the forest
yielded, with gums ambrosial oozing, &c._) combining legitimate quantity
(in which accent and position are alike observed) with illegitimate (in
which position is observed, but accent disregarded) into a not
unpleasing rhythm, cannot be considered as more than imperfect
realizations of the true positional principle. Tennyson's three
specimens are, at least in English, still unique. It is to be hoped that
he will not suffer them to remain so. Systems of Glyconics and
Asclepiads are, if I mistake not, easily manageable, and are only
thought foreign to the genius of our language because they have never
been written on strict principles of art by a really great master.
What, then, are the rules on which such rhythms become possible? They
are, briefly, these:--(1) accented syllables, _as a general rule_, are
long, though some syllables which count as long need not be accented,
as in
_All that on earth's leas blooms, what blossoms Thessaly nursing,_
_blossoms_, though only accented on the first syllable, counts for a
spondee, the shortness of the second _o_ being partly helped out by the
two consonants which follow it; partly by the fact that the syllable is
_in thesi_; (2) the laws of position are to be observed, according to
the general rules of classical prosody: (_a_) dactyls terminating in a
consonant like _beautiful_, _bounteous_, or ending in a double vowel or
a diphthong like _all of you, surely may, come to thee_, must be
followed by a word beginning with a vowel or _y_ or _h_; dactyls
terminating in a vowel or _y_, like _slippery_, should be followed,
except in rare cases, by words beginning with a consonant; trochees,
whether composed of one word or more, should, if ending in a consonant,
be followed by a vowel, if ending in the vowel _a_, by a consonant,
thus, _planted around_ not _planted beneath_, _Aurora the sun's_ not
_Aurora a sun's_ (see however, lxiv. 253), but _unto a wood, any again,
sorry at all, you be amused_. (_b_) Syllables made up of a vowel
followed by two or more consonants, each of which is distinctly heard in
pronunciation, as _long_, _sins_, _part_, _band_, _waits_, _souls_,
_ears_, _must_, _heart_, _bright_, _strength_, _end_, _and_, _rapt_,
_hers_, _dealt_, mo_ment_, bo_soms_, _answers_, moun_tains_, bear_est_,
tum_bling_, gi_ving_, com_ing_, harbour_ing_, diffi_cult_, immi_nent_,
strata_gems_, utter_ance_, happi_est_, trem_bling_ly, can never rank as
short, even if unaccented and followed by a vowel, _h_ or _y_. Thus, to
go back to Longfellow's line,
_This is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlocks,_
_for(e)st_, _murmur(i)ng_, _pines (a)nd the_, are all inadmissible. But
where a vowel is followed by two consonants, one of which is unheard or
only heard slightly, as in _acc_use, sh_all_, _ass_emble, _diss_emble,
kind_ness_, com_pass_, _aff_ect, _app_ear, _ann_oy, or when the second
or third consonant is a liquid, as in _betray_, _beslime_, _besmear_,
_depress_, _dethrone_, _agree_, the vowel preceding is so much more
short than long as to be regularly admissible as short, rarely
admissible as long. On this principle I have allowed _dis[o]rd(e)rl(y)_,
_t[e]n(a)ntl(e)ss_, _heav(e)nl(y)_, to rank as dactyls.
These rules are after all only an outline, and perhaps can never be made
more. It will be observed that they are more negative than positive. The
reason of this is not far to seek. The main difference between my verses
and those of other contemporary writers--the one point on which I claim
for myself the merit of novelty--is the strict observance throughout of
the rules of position. But the strict observance of position is in
effect the strict avoidance of unclassical collocations of syllables: it
is almost wholly negative. To illustrate my meaning I will instance the
poems written in pure iambics, the _Phaselus ille_ and _Quis hoc potest
uidere_. Heyse translates the first line of the former of these poems by
_Die Galeotte, die ihr schauet, liebe Herrn,_
and this would be a fair representation of a pure iambic line, according
to the views of most German and most English writers. Yet not only is
_Die_ no short syllable, but _ihr_, itself long, is made more hopelessly
long by preceding three consonants in _schauet_, just as the last
syllable of _schauet_, although in itself short, loses its right to
stand for a true short in being followed by the first consonant of
_liebe_. My own translation,
_The puny pinnace yonder you, my friends, discern,_
whatever its defects, is at least a pretty exact representation of a
pure iambic line. xxix. 6-8, are thus translated by Heyse:--
_Und jener soll in Uebermuthes Ueberfluss
Von einem Bett zum andern in die Runde gehn?_
by me thus,
_Shall he in o'er-assumption, o'er-repletion he,
Sedately saunter every dainty couch along?_
The difference is purely negative; I have bound myself to avoid certain
positions forbidden by the laws of ancient prosody. To some I may seem
to have lost in vigour by the process; yet I believe the sense of
triumph over the difficulties of our language, the satisfaction of
approaching in a novel and perceptibly felt manner one of those
excellences which, as much as anything, contributes to the permanent
charm of Catullus, his dainty versification, will more than compensate
for any shortcomings which the difficulty of the task has made
inevitable. The same may be said of the elaborately artificial poem to
Camerius (c. lv.), and the almost unapproachable Attis (c. lxiii.).
Here, at least half the interest lies in the varied turns of the metre;
if these can be represented with anything like faithfulness, the gain in
exactness of prosody is enough, in my judgment, to counterbalance the
possible loss of freedom in expression.
There is another circumstance which tends to make modern rules of
prosody necessarily negative. Quantity, in English revivals of ancient
metre, depends not only on position, but on accent. But accent varies
greatly in different words; _heavy level ever cometh any_, have the same
accent as _empty evil either boometh penny_; but the first syllable in
the former set of words is lighter than in the latter. Hence, though
accented, they may, on occasion, be considered and used as short; as, on
the same principle, _dolorous stratagem echoeth family_, usually
dactyls, may, on occasion, become tribrachs. But how lay down any
positive rule in matter necessarily so fluctuating? We cannot. All we
can do is to refuse admission as short syllables to any heavier accented
syllable. Here, then, much must be left to individual discretion. My
translation of the Attis will best show my own feeling in the matter.
But I am fully aware that in this respect I have fallen far short of
consistency. I have made _any_ sometimes short, more often long; _to_,
usually short, is lengthened in lxi. 26, lxvii. 19, lxviii. 143; _with_
is similarly long, though not followed by a consonant, in lxi. 36;
_given_ is long in xxviii. 7, short in xi. 17, lxiv. 213; _are_ is short
in lxvii. 14; and more generally many syllables allowed to pass for
short in the Attis are elsewhere long. Nor have I scrupled to forsake
the ancient quantity in proper names; following Heyse, I have made the
first syllable of _Verona_ short in xxxv. 3, lxvii. 34, although it
retains its proper quantity in lxviii. 27. Again, _Pheneos_ is a dactyl
in lxviii. 111, while _Satrachus_ is an anapaest in xcv. 5. In many of
these instances I have acted consciously; if the writers of Greece and
Rome allowed many syllables to be doubtful, and almost as a principle
avoid perfect uniformity in the quantity of proper names, a greater
freedom may not unfairly be claimed by their modern imitators. If
Catullus could write _Phars(a)liam coeunt, Phars(a)lia regna
frequentant_, similar license may surely be extended to me. I believe,
indeed, that nothing in my translation is as violent as the double
quantity just mentioned in Catullus; but if there is, I would remind my
readers of Goethe's answer to the boy who told him he had been guilty of
a hexameter with seven feet, and applying the remark to any seeming
irregularities in my own translation would say, _Lass die Bestie
stehen_.
It would not be difficult to swell this Preface by enlarging on the
novelty of the attempt, and indirectly panegyrising my own undertaking.
I doubt whether any real advantage would thus be gained. If I have
merely produced an elaborate failure, however much I might expatiate on
the principles which guided me, my work would be an elaborate failure
still. I shall therefore say no more, and shall be contented if I please
the, even in this classically trained country, too limited number of
readers who can really hear with their ears--if, to use the borrowed
language of a great poet, I succeed in making myself vocal to the
intelligent alone.
[Footnote A: The translation follows this edition (Oxford, 1867), in the
constitution of the text, as well as in the sectional division of the
poems.]