The Poems and Fragments of Catullus | Page 3

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