Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

neither shall his place know him any more.' Job vii. 9, 10.

"How goodly are thy tents, O Jacob! and thy tabernacles, O Israel! As the valleys are they spread forth; as gardens by the river-side; as the trees of lign-aloes which the Lord hath planted, and as cedar-trees beside the waters."-Numbers xxiv. 56.

Compare the harmonious cadences of this fine prose in our own old version of Holy Writ, with the halting, dancing, lumbering, grating, nondescript paragraphs in Macpherson's Ossian.

Greek and Latin Prosody.

The metres of Greek and Roman verse are the glories of those two languages: the one, the most copious, opulent, and flexible; the other, the most condensed and energetic of any that are well known. These two tongues contain treasures of literature, esteemed by the learned above all that time has spared of the works of past generations; principally, no doubt, for their intrinsic value, but partly, also, on account of their rarity and antiquity; and yet more so from the impulse of our own early prejudices in their favour, and those noble, venerable, and beautiful affinities which they hold with all that

"Seems wisest, virtuousest, discreetest, best."

MILTON.

among the most extraordinary people of the old world; living, as they did, in the light of nature, but under circumstances peculiarly favourable to the development of every kind of talent; who cultivated all the fine arts, and carried, as we have ocular demonstration, history, eloquence, poetry, architecture, and sculpture, even to the vanishing point of perfection. Nor, in the abstruse sciences, were their

attainments less admirable; while, in music and painting - from contemporaneous testimony and analogy with their other accomplishments-we may presume that they had reached an exquisite proficiency; yet, from their ignorance of thorough bass in the one, and the perfect management of lights and shadows in the other, it is difficult to imagine that in these they could compete with the greatest masters and practitioners of modern times.

The construction of Greek and Latin verse is pretty well understood; indeed, the theory may be considered as quite made out by rule and precedent; but, after all, the true pronunciation of both languages having been in a great degree forgotten, our mode of giving utterance to their metres must be exceedingly imperfect; although we can ascertain the number of syllables in every word, and designate the quantity of each syllable; and notwithstanding the wonderful precision with which the most doubtful and difficult passages can be analyzed; the most corrupt amended, if not restored; and the authenticity even of accredited readings tried by tests as subtle, and almost as infallible, as those employed in modern chymistry. Nothing, indeed, in human learning, human sagacity, or human taste, is more remarkable than the skill manifested by the Bentleys and Porsons of our days, in detecting all the niceties of a dead language; yet, from the very circumstances of the language being dead,-though the anatomy of every nerve and sinew be correctly demonstrated, the life itself being gone, something must be wanting which cannot be seen, and the absence of which must be felt. Hence our perception of classical rhythm must be rendered so defective, that the most perfect tact of verbal criticism is but like the fine touch of the blind man, whereby he ascertains the forms of substances submitted to it, while there is, in his apprehension, an undefinable accession of knowledge possessed by others, which

could only be communicated to him by the opening of his eyes, though what that phrase means, in reference to a fifth sense which he has not, he can no more conceive than we can of a sixth which does not exist.

The difference between the common reading and the scanning, according to the laws of prosody, of a Greek or Latin hexameter line (for example) is so great with modern scholars, that it is almost as difficult to imagine how these could have been rendered correspondent, so as to make the ancient pronunciation the same in prose and in verse (as it must have been, and as it is in every living tongue), it is almost as difficult to imagine how this could have been, as how such light might be let in to the mind's eye of a man born blind, as would supply the lack of sight to his bodily eye, and enable him, without the latter, to distinguish colours, or even to conceive the idea of colour.

The different methods of pronouncing the learned languages, which obtain among scholars of different nations, according to the alphabetical sounds of their own, make them barbarians to one another when they would converse in Greek or Latin. Our countrymen, especially, must be nearly unintelligible to continentals, in much of their utterance of those very words, on the collocation of which all (in their peculiar way) dwell with rapture, and expatiate with eloquence. I speak of the general extravagant style of classical critics,-with which no other theme can inspire them. Hence, however perfect in theory modern prosody may be, in practice it stumbles on the threshold; and it is perhaps a thousand years or more since a line of Homer or Virgil has been repeated in the same manner as Virgil or Homer would have spoken it, that is, with the sound which the one or the other had in his ear when he composed it. It is even a question, whether the most sonorous and magnificent period of Cicero could now be

read so as the orator himself would have easily understood it.

This is an exceedingly curious and complex subject, and quite unfit to be discussed in a popular essay, were the writer himself confidently master of it, which he pretends not to be. It is, however, necessary to state, that notwithstanding our doubts, or to speak plainly, our ignorance, of the manner in which Greek and Latin metres were recited, when a single line-an hexameter, for instance-might vary from thirteen to seventeen syllables, so that six consecutive lines might be of so many different lengths, while the minor changes are scarcely computable,there yet is found among the relics of classical song, whether read with the accents observed in prose, or according to the technical rules of metre, such accordance, strength, flexibility, and sweetness, in the combination and succession of sounds, that we feel, though we cannot tell how we feel that there was a harmony, grace, and perfection in ancient numbers, which modern languages, in their best estate, have few capabilities of rivalling.

The incompetence of the latter may be traced, primarily, to the fact, that, with the exception of the German, none of the western and southern European dialects will sustain the length of an hexameter line; and, consequently, must fail in all the other modes of verse measured by a standard so delicate and variable as quantity. In English, syllabic quantity, and even accents, are so undefined, that, according to the taste of the writer, both may be ruled at pleasure, if he have but an ear, at once so experienced and sensitive, to modulate his cadences in such a manner that, by the flow of the preceding syllables, the reader shall be prepared to fall inevitably upon the precise rhythm which he had predetermined for the line. This, however, is so rarely achieved that, in our anapæstic or dactylic verse (except in the most monotonous strains), it is

scarcely possible for a good reader, even when the verse is good, to run through half a dozen couplets without stumbling half as many times. All attempts, therefore, to frame poems with our brief, unfettered Saxon idioms, on the principles of those in the learned languages, must be hopeless. Men of the greatest skill have miscarried here; and I know not that success were desirable, since it could not be attained, except by enthralling with foreign fetters our free-born British speech.

Not having a modern example at hand,—though the enterprise has been effected with as much good speed as our slippery tongue would allow, by Dr. Southey,—I shall offer a few lines of Sir Philip Sidney's, from a pastoral in his Arcadia; a book once celebrated by all the wits and beauties of an age of gallantry, though probably not read through by six of either class during the last half century :

"Lady, reserved by the heavens, to do pastors' companie honour,

Joyning your sweete voice to the rurall Muse of a desart,
Here you fully do finde this strange operation of love,

How to the woods Love runnes, as well as rides to the palace;
Neither he beares reverence to a prince, nor pity to a beggar,
But, like a point in the midst of a circle, is still of a nearnesse;
All to a lesson he draws, neither hills nor caves can avoid
him."

These lines are not amiss; but who could survive an Iliad of them? One great defect in our English tongue (heart of oak as it is in strength and toughness), is the paucity of spondees in its vocabulary. Without these, no hexameter can close well, or be well balanced in its progress. Under such a disability, our language becomes supple and languid in ancient metres, instead of elastic and rebounding to its natural tone, after the utmost flexure or tension which the laws of such labours require.

« AnteriorContinuar »