ITO THE EDITOR OF THE "SPEOTATOR:!')
SIR,—I must apologize for being so far behind the times, but I seldom have the chance of seeing an English newspaper, and I have only quite lately seen the correspondence that has been appearing in the Spectator on the subject of English hexa- meters—a. correspondence that was, I suppose, started by your review of my version of the "Odyssey." I am not going to trouble you with a repetition of my creed in regard to the hexameter and its possibilities, for I have stated my•beliefs- as far as I hold any formulated beliefs on the subject—in the Preface of my book, But there is just one point that I should like to touch on. Let me illustrate this point by Mr. Watson's pentameter, which you quote with such enthusiastic approval:— "When upon• orchard and lane breaks the white foam of the
spring."
Everybody with any sense for the beauty of word-pictures andthe music of language would agree with you in admiring this line, and it would be vandalism to propose any emenda- tion, since (as Dante tells us) nothing that has once been har- monized into a true artistic form can he changed without ruining all its harmony ; but do you not feel that, if we wish to use the hexameters or the elegiac couplet as a delicate and sensitive medium, we must endeavour to adopt some such rule in regard to dactyls as I have suggested in my Preface—a rule that I have tried to carry. out in my translation; namely, that for the " shorts " of the dactyl we should avoid as much as possible all monosyllables or dissyllables that are weighted with meaning and make one pause to thinhP I have given from Kingsley's "Andromeda" several dactyls that seem to me to be "painful faults " amid "richly harmonized music," and I cannot but confess that " breaks the white . . " is equally painful to my ear, however much I admire the line for other reasons. Rhythmically Clough's pentameter " While from Janiculum heights thundered the cannon of France " seems to me better than Mr. Watson's line.—I am, Sir, &c., Lessingstrasse 2, Freiburg i. Br. H. B. COTTERILL, P.S.—A. propos of the English pentameter, I wonder if you will agree with me in thinking that it might be well to con- sider whether we could not manage to construct it more on the old lines, so as to preserve better the poise and equilibrium of the Greek and Latin line, in which (to take one detail) the last word is very seldom indeed a monosyllable, and the last syllable generally unemphatic--not weighted with meaning or apt to make one pause to think—whereas in most English pentameters the line ends with a bang and often with a very weighty word. Of course the differences between an analytic and a synthetic language have to be taken into consideration, so that "of France" may be perhaps regarded as a single word.
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