Chapter II: Part 2

Now, in stating the results thus, I wish it to be observed in the first place, that I throw no sort of doubt on the possibility that in the days of Herodotus and Pericles some of the diphthongal sounds here declared normal in the days of the Ptolemies and the Cæsars might have been pronounced otherwise. The theory of Pennington, also, (p. 51), that there might have co-existed in ancient times a system of orthoepy for reciting the old poets, considerably different from that used in common conversation, may be entertained by whosoever pleases, and is not without its uses; but in the present purely practical inquiry we must leave all mere theory out of view. It is also perfectly open to Liscov, or any philologist, working out a suggestion of the great Herman, to prove from the internal analogy of the language, and especially from a comparison of the most ancient dialects,[23] that _originally_ the diphthongs were pronounced differently from what they are now, and were in the days of Ptolemy Philadelphus, (Homer unquestionably said, παις—_païs_, and not _pace_. II. _Z_, 467;) but in the present investigation, as a practical man, I want something better than general probabilities and philosophical negations, or even isolated correct assertions; I want a complete scheme of Greek pronunciation, for some particular age, congruous within itself, and standing on something like historical evidence. This I find only in the pronunciation of the modern Greeks, or in that of the Ptolemies and Cæsars, which differs from the other only in a very few points. What then, we may ask, should hinder us from at once adopting this pronunciation? Nothing, I imagine, but the dull inertness of mere conservatism, (which in such matters is very potent,) the conceit of academical men, proud of their own clumsy invention, and the dread of ITACISM. Is it not monstrous, we hear it said, that half a dozen different vowels, or combinations of vowels, should be pronounced in the same way, and that in such a fashion as only curs yelp, and mice squeak, and tenuous shades with feeble whine flit through the airy paths that lead to Pluto’s unsubstantial hall? Now, I at once admit that the prevalence of the slender sound of _i_ (_ee_), is a corruption from the original purity of Hellenic vocalization, from which I have no doubt the Pelasgi, and the venerable patriarchs who put up the lions, now seen on the gates of Mycenæ, were free; but no language spoken by a polished people is free from some corruption of this kind; and this particular corruption, like the defects observable in men of great original genius, is characteristic. In such strongly marked men as Beethoven, Samuel Johnson, and John Hunter the physiologist, nothing is more easy than for the nice moralist to point out half a dozen points of character that he could have wished otherwise. So it is with language. Who, for instance, would not wish to reform the capriciousness of our English systemless system of spelling and pronunciation? Who can say that we have not too much of the sibilant sound of _s_ and _th_ in our language? who will not lament the want of body in our vocalization, and the tendency to the ineffective tribrachic and even proceleusmatic accent in the termination of our polysyllables? In German, again, who does not indulge in a spurt of indignation against “_Wenn Ich mich nicht_,” and other such common collocations of gutturals? and in Italian are we not so cloyed with _ōnes_ and _āres_, and other broad trochaic modulations, that we long for the resurrection of some Gothic Quinctilian to inoculate the luscious “_lingua Toscana in bocca Romana_,” with a few harsh solecisms; while the French, who for cleverness and refinement, (and some other things also,) are a sort of Greeks, do so clip and mince the stout old Roman lingo, which they have adopted, that except in the mouth of flower girls and ballet dancers, their dialect is altogether intolerable to many a masculine ear. All these things are true; but no sane man thinks of rebelling against such hereditary characteristics of a human language, any more than he would against the ingrained peculiarities of human character. We take these things as we find them; just as we must make the best of a snub nose, or a set of bad teeth in an otherwise pretty face. So also we must even attune our ears to the Itacism of the Greeks; otherwise we shall assuredly sin against a notable characteristic of the language, much more intimately connected with the genius of that singular people, than many a clipper of new Greek grammars and filcher of notes to old Attic plays imagines. What says QUINCTILIAN? _Non possumus esse tam_ GRACILES; _simus_ FORTIORES, (xii. 10.) Now, I ask the defenders of our modern system of pronouncing Greek in this country, which some of them perhaps call classical and Erasmian, but which is in fact, as has been proved, an incoherent jabber of barbarisms, what if the so much decried _Itacism_ were part of this _gracilitas_, this slenderness or tenuity of ancient Hellenic speech, by which it was to the ear of the greatest of Latin rhetoricians so strikingly distinguished from the Roman? Certain it is, that the rude Teutonic sounds of _ou_ and _i_, (English _i_ and _ai_ in _Kaiser_), that we hear so often in English Greek, do not answer to Quinctilian’s description. In fact, both English and Scotch, instead of preserving this natural contrast between Greek and Roman enunciation, have in this, and in other matters, (as we shall see presently, when we come to talk of accents,) done everything in their power to sweep it away; and of nothing am I more firmly convinced than of this, that a living conception of what the spoken Greek language really was in its best days, will never be attained by any scholar who has not the courage to kick all the Erasmian academic gear aside for a season, and take a free amble with some living Christopoulos, or Papadopoulos, on the banks of the Ilissus, or round the base of Lycabettus. This living experience of the language is indeed the only efficient way to argue against the learned prejudices of academic men; for, as THIERSCH well observes, every one laughs at that pronunciation to which he has not been accustomed, (_Sprachlehre_, sect. xvii. 3;) and no man can live at Athens for any time, without having his ears reconciled to a slight deviation from perfect euphony, or even coming to admire it, as one sometimes does the lisp of a pretty woman, or the squint of an arch humorist.[24]

[23] GODOFREDI HERMANI _de emendenda ratione Græcæ grammaticæ_, Lib. i. c. 2, quoted at length by LISCOV, p. 21.

[24] On revisal it strikes me I have given the enemies of Itacism an unfair advantage by not stating, that, while in any other language the attenuation of so many different sounds into one, might have proved a very grievous evil, there is such a richness of the full sound of α (which the English have effaced) and ω in Greek, that the blemish rarely offends. I have to mention also, that, while a certain prominence even of this slender sound seems necessary to the phonetic character of Greek, as distinguished from Latin, I have no objection, in reading Homer and the elder poets, (were it only for the sake of the often quoted πολυφλοίσβοιο θαλάσσης!) to pronounce οι, as _boy_ in English, and η, as we do it in Scotland; just as in reading Chaucer we may be forced to adopt some of the peculiarities of the pronunciation of his day. But in the common use of the prose language, I think it safer to stick by the tradition of so many centuries, than to venture on patches of classical restoration, where it is impossible to revive a consistent whole. I may say also, that if υ be pronounced uniformly like the French _u_, the itacism will be diminished by one letter, while the difference between that and the modern Greek pronunciation is so slight, that a Scotchman so speaking in Athens will be generally understood, whereas our broad Scotch _u_ (_oo_) besides being entirely without classical authority, recedes so far from the actual pronunciation of the Greeks, as to be a serious bar in the way of intelligibility.

So much for the vowel-sounds. I say nothing of the consonants, because they are of less consequence in the controversy. I have already spoken incidentally about β, (p. 21 above), and I have no wish to write a complete treatise. Detailed information on minute points of neo-Hellenic pronunciation may be found in Pennington’s work already quoted, and in a recent work by Corpe.[25] I now proceed to the matter of ACCENT, which we shall find to be no less important, but happily much more easily settled.

“In the pronunciation of a Greek word,” says JELF,[26] “regard ought to be had both to accent and quantity;” a most significant power lying in that word OUGHT, as we know well that many teachers in this country pay a very irregular regard to quantity in reading, and very few, if any, pay any regard to accent.[27] But that the proposition laid down by Mr. JELF is true, no scholar can doubt for a moment, though Mr. PENNINGTON, in the year 1844, most evidently anticipated a great amount of stolidity, obstinacy, and scepticism, among his academic friends on this point; with such minute and scrupulous care, and breadth of philological preparation does he set himself to prove, what no man that had ever dipped into an ancient Greek grammar, or a common Latin work on rhetoric, would ever dream of denying. However, I gave myself some trouble to set forth this matter learnedly some years ago,[28] knowing that I might have to do with persons not always open to reason, and utterly impervious to nature and common sense; and the Fellow of King’s also might have had occasion to know that it is one thing to prick soft flesh with a pin, another to drive nails into a stone wall. The fact is, that the living Greek language having come down to us with most audible accentuation, and the signs of these accents being contained in all printed Greek books, and not only so, but commented on by a long series of grammarians, from Herodian and Arcadius, down through the Homeric bishop of Thessalonica, to Gaza and Lascaris; in this state of the case, if any man does not pronounce Greek according to accents, while I do, the burden of proof lies with him who throws off all established authority in the matter, not with me who acknowledge it. If there is no authority for accent in the ancient grammarians, then as little is there for quantity. The fact of the existence of the one as a living characteristic of the spoken and written language of ancient Greece, stands exactly on the same foundation as the other. So many ancient grammars, and comments on grammars have been published within the last fifty years by Bekker and other library-excavators, that the teacher who now requires to be taught formally that the ancients really used accents in their public elocution, is more worthy of a good flogging than the greatest dunce in his drill. But what were accents? Accents are an _intension_ and _remission_ (ἐπίτασις and ἄνεσις) of the voice in articulate speech, whereby one syllable receives a marked predominance over the others, this predominance manifesting itself principally in a higher note or intonation given to the accented syllable.[29] This definition occurs fifty times if it occurs once in the works of the ancient grammarians and rhetoricians; so I need not trouble myself here by an array of erudite citations to prove it; and that such an accent is both possible and easy to bring out in the case of any Greek word, may be experienced by anybody who will pronounce κεφαλή with a marked rise of the voice on the last syllable, or νεφέλη with a similar intension of vocal utterance on the penult. That the living Greeks give a distinct prominence to these very syllables, any man may learn by seeking them out in Manchester or London, in both which places they have a chapel. Why then should Etonian schoolmasters, and Oxonian lecturers not do the same? Do they not teach the doctrine of accents? Have they not translated GOETTLING? Do they not print all their books with those very marks which Aristophanes of Byzantium, two thousand years ago, with provident cunning, devised even for this purpose, that we, studious academic men, in the then ULTIMA THULE of civilisation, should now have the pleasure of intoning a philosophic period as the divine Plato did, or a blast of patriotic indignation as Demosthenes? They say there are no accents properly so called in the French language. This I never could exactly understand; but do our academic men actually realize this peculiar form of levelled human enunciation, (the ὁμαλισμὸς of the old grammarians,) without intension or remission, by pronouncing Greek altogether unaccented? Believe it not. As if determined to produce a scholastic impersonation of every possible monstrosity with regard to the finest language in the world, they neglect the written accents which lie before their nose, and read according to those accents which they have borrowed from the Latin! and this directly in the teeth of the public declaration of CICERO and QUINCTILIAN, that Latin had one monotonous law of accentuation, Greek another and a much more rich and various one.[30] And, as if to place the top-stone on the pyramid of absurdities which they pile, after reading Greek with this Latin accent (which sounds to a Greek ear exactly as a rude Frenchman’s first attempts at English sound to an Englishman) for some half dozen years, they set seriously to cram their brain-chambers with rules how Greek accents should be placed, and exercise their memory and their eye, with a most villainous abuse of function, in doing that work which should have been done from the beginning by the ear! If consistency could have been looked for from men involved in such a labyrinth of bungling, there would have been something heroic in throwing away the marks altogether from their books and from their brains, as well as from their tongue; certainly this procedure would have saved many a peeping editor a great deal of trouble, and many a brisk young gentleman riding up in a Cambridge “coach” right into the possession of a snug tutorship in Trinity, would have travelled on a smoother road, and felt less seriously how the flowers of ancient literature are scarce to be enjoyed amid the thorns of modern grammar that besiege a man’s fingers and eyes from all sides.[31] But intellectual consistency is not to be expected from persons once involved in a gross error, any more than moral consistency is from thieves; and it is well for all parties that it is so; for by this wise arrangement of nature, as a thief’s story often discovers the theft it would conceal, so a philologer’s nonsense is most readily refuted by the remnants of incoherent sense that he had not wit or courage enough to eliminate. Besides, the dictum of PORSON stood mighty over their heads;[32] and as for the young men, the more time that was wasted on a reasonless method of teaching Greek, the less danger would there be of that rude invasion of BOTANY, GEOLOGY, HISTORY, and all the array of modern sciences which has long been the special terror of English academic men. So they went on, and so they go on now, teaching that people ought to accent κεφαλή on the last syllable, and yet actually accenting it on the first! The consequence of which perverse proceeding is not only that accents are one of the most difficult things to learn in Greek, and seldom thoroughly mastered even by those who are excellent scholars otherwise, (_see_ JELF, page 52, _note_), but an accomplished English scholar, when he makes his continental tour, as is common enough in these days, even with men who have not much money, finds that his perverse enunciation of the Greek vowels, combined with his utter neglect of accents, has put him in possession of a language of which he can make no use except in soliloquy, and which any person can understand sooner than a native of the country to which it belongs.[33] He then comes home belike and tells his English friends that the modern Greeks are a set of barbarians, who speak a “swallow’s jabber,” so corrupt that no scholar can understand a word they say! So true is the record which honest Thomas Fuller has left of the issue of the notable Hellenic controversy raised by Sir John Cheke—“Here Bishop Gardiner, chancellor of the university, interposed his power, affirming Cheke’s pronunciation, pretended to be ancient, to be antiquated. He imposed a penalty on all such as used this new pronunciation, which, notwithstanding, since hath prevailed, and whereby we Englishmen speak Greek and are able to understand one another, _which nobody else can_.”[34]

[25] CORPE’s Neo-Hellenic Greek Grammar. London, 1851. See also a notice of this work in the ATHENÆUM for last year, where I am happy to observe that the opinions advocated in this paper are supported.

[26] Greek Grammar. 1851, sect. 44, 45. DONALDSON (Greek Grammar, p. 17) says, ‘The accent is the sharp or elevated sound with which one of the last three syllables of a Greek word is _regularly_ pronounced. This “_regularly_” is as significant as Mr. JELF’s “_ought_.”’

[27] Of course I except Professor MASSON of Belfast, whose complete mastery of the living dialect of Greece is the object of admiration to all who know him.

[28] Classical Museum, vol. i. p. 338.

[29] There is also a greater _emphasis_ or _stress_ given to the accented syllable, as is manifest from the pronunciation of the modern Greeks, and from the striking fact that in the modern dialect, the unaccented syllable has sometimes been dropt, while the accented constitutes the whole modern word, as δὲν for οὐδὲν, μᾶς for ἡμᾶς.

[30] QUINCTIL., lib. i. c. 5; DIOMED. de Oratione, ii.; PUTSCH. i. 426.

[31] JELF, in the Preface to his Grammar, calls the doctrine of accent “a difficult branch of scholarship.” The difficulty is altogether an artificial one, made by scholastic men who will insist on teaching by the eye only and the understanding, what has no meaning at all except when addressed to the ear. The doctrine of accentuation in English has no peculiar difficulty, plainly because men learn it in the natural way by hearing.

[32] “_Si quis igitur vestrum ad accuratam Græcarum literarum scientiam aspirat, is probabilem sibi accentuum rationem quam maturrime comparet, in propositoque perstet scurrarum dicacitate et stultorum derisione immotus_,” ad Med. 1, apud JELF, vol. i. p. 37. I wonder if Porson himself pronounced according to the accents. If he did not, he is just another instance of that extraordinary incapacity of apprehending a large principle that is so characteristic of the English mind.

[33] I may insert here the whole of the passage of BOISSONADE, from which the words in one of the prefixed mottoes are taken. “_Nisi quod maxime cupio, in omnibus academiis nostris, gymnasiis et scholis hodierna Græcorum pronuntiatio recipiatur. Nam cum prorsus perierit antiqua pronuntiandi ratio qua Demosthenes, et Sophocles, vel ipsi Alexandrini sub Ptolemæis utebantur, et fere ridiculum sit unumquemque populum ad suæ linguæ sonos, atque etiam ad libitum, Græcorum quos legit librorum pronuntiationem efformare, id saltem boni, admissa neotericorum pronuntiatione, lucrabimur, non solum ut Gallus homo et Germanus Anglum intelligant Græce loquentem et ab illo Græce ipsi loquentes intelligantur, sed id etiam ut cum Græcis doctis et scholastica institutione politis confabulemur verbis antiquorum et facillime, si velimus, hodiernæ linguæ cognitionem ac usum assequamur._”—HERODIAN, Epimerisni, BOISSONADE. London, 1819. Prefat.

[34] History of the University of Cambridge, Section vii.

Let us now ask in a single sentence how all this mass of absurdity came about; for we may depend upon it a whole array of brave philologic hoplites cannot have stumbled on their way suddenly without the apparition of some real or imaginary ghost. The ghost that frightened them on the present occasion, and caused them to forswear SPOKEN ACCENT (for as we have seen they stuck to it on PAPER) was QUANTITY; concerning which, therefore, we must now inquire, whether it be a real ghost or only a white sheet. Quantity, they say, cannot stand before Accent, or rather is swallowed up by it. Like hostile religious sects, or belligerent medical corporations, they cannot meet without quarrelling; so the public peace is consulted by getting rid of one of them, not in the way of violent murder, (for the law does not allow that,) but by what certain philosophical Chartist-Reformers used to call “painless extinction.” Therefore they who speak according to accent, are wont to remove quantity out of the way noiselessly; and they who speak according to quantity must treat accent in the same way. This is an old story. The BEAR in Erasmus’ dialogue, (Havercamp, ii. 95,) speaking rare wisdom in a gruff Johnsonian sort of style, says, “_Sunt quidam adeo_ CRASSI _ut non distinguant accentum a quantitate, quum sit longe diversa ratio_. =ALIUD EST ENIM ACUTUM ALIUD DIU TINNIRE: ALIUD INTENDI, ALIUD EXTENDI.= _At eruditos novi qui, quum pronunciarent illud_ ἀνέχου καὶ ἀπέχου, _mediam syllabam, quoniam tonum habet acutum, quantum possent producerent, quum sit natura brevis vel brevissima potius_.” Certain learned men, it appears, in the beginning of the sixteenth century, could not accent the word ἀνέχου on the penult, as it ought to be accented, without in the same breath making that syllable long, which it is not. To avoid this blunder, the Etonians, Oxonians, and other famous modern teachers, omit the accent altogether on that syllable and on every syllable—of which the name is legion—similarly situated in the Greek language, and thus, by removing the cause, are sure of annihilating the effect. A very obvious, but surely a very clumsy expedient, and hardly worthy of the subtlety of the academic mind. A man by running too hard sometimes breaks his legs; and you forthwith vow to avoid his fate by sitting in your chair constantly and taking no exercise! Let us see how the case stands here. The accent, you say, lengthens the syllable. Take any English word in the first place, (as nonsense is not so transparent in a learned tongue,) and make the experiment. If a Scotsman says _véesible_, you will allow, I suppose, that the first syllable of that word is both long and accented: if an Englishman says _viśible_, ’tis equally clear that the same syllable is still accented, but it is not now long. Accent, therefore, in English has no necessary power to lengthen the sound of the vowel of the syllable on which it is placed; and if some learned men on the banks of the Rhine, in the days of Erasmus, or on the banks of the Isis, in our day, cannot accent a syllable without at the same time lengthening it, this happens merely because, as the Bear says, they are “ADEO CRASSI;” their ears are gross, and have lost—by the dust of the libraries, perhaps—the healthy power of discerning differences of modulation in the living human voice. Not a few persons have I met with among those who are, or would be scholars, in this country, who in this way assert that it is impossible to put the accent on the penult of a Greek word, and at the same time, as the law of the language requires, make the last syllable long. But these persons had got their ears confounded by the traditionary jargon of teachers inculcating from dead books a doctrine of which they had no living apprehension; and this, along with the utter neglect of musical and elocutionary culture so common among our classical devotees, had rendered them incapable of perceiving, without an act of special attention, the commonest phenomena of spoken language appealing to the ear. In the English words _echo_, _primrose_, and many other of the same description, the accent and quantity stand in that exact relation which is so characteristic of Greek, as in ἔχω, λόγῳ; while in the English words _clód-pated_, _hoúsekeeper_, we have that precise disposal of accent and quantity which occurs in the word ἄνθρωπος, and which has been so often quoted as a proof that it is impossible to give effect to accent without violating quantity.[35] A very slight elocutionary culture would put a stop to such vain talk; but we have, unfortunately, too many scholars who gather their crude notions on such subjects from a few phrases current in the schools, without ever questioning their own ears, the only proper witness of what is right or wrong in the matter of enunciation. Hence the cumbrous mass of erudite nonsense on accent and quantity under which our library shelves groan; hence the host of imaginary difficulties and impossibilities that birch-bearing men will raise when you tell them to perform the simplest act of perception of which an unsophisticated human ear is capable. “_Vel ab_ ASINIS _licebat hoc discrimen discere_,” continues the learned Bear, “_qui rudentes corripiunt acutam vocem, imam producunt_.” Very true; a really wise man may learn much from an ass; but they who conceit themselves to be wise, when they are not, will learn from nobody. And so I conclude with regard to this whole matter of QUANTITY, that it is only an imaginary ghost after all; a white sheet which a single touch of the finger will turn aside, or only a white mist, perhaps, which, if a brave man will only march up to, he shall not know that it is there.

[35] When I was at the railway station, SKIPTON, in Yorkshire, waiting for a train, I heard one of the men call out, “Any person for _Mánchéster_” with a distinct and well-marked dwelling of the voice on the second as well as the first syllable. This gave me a very vivid idea of the manner in which the Greeks must have pronounced ἄνθρωπος, accenting the first syllable, but dwelling on the second syllable with a distinct prolongation of the voice.

One thing, however, I will admit—by way of palliation for the enormous blunders that have been committed in this matter—that in words of two, three, or more syllables, where the accent is on a syllable naturally short, while the long syllable is unaccented, a careless speaker may readily slur over the long syllable so as to make it short, thus converting an anapæst accented on the first syllable, as

ˏ ˏ
_cĕlăndīne_, into a tribrach with the same accent _cĕlăndĭn_,

a very common vulgarism, as we all know. The unaccented syllable, indeed, is, in the very nature of things, placed in a position where it is not so likely to get its fair mass of sound as its accented neighbour. Thus, except in solemn speaking, the first syllable of ŌBĒDĬĔNT seldom gets full weight, though it is equally long with its accented sequent; and the second syllable of EDUCATION is vulgarized into _edication_, purely from the want of the accent. But that such vulgarisms should form any bar in the way of academical men doing proper justice to the correct elocution of the Greeks is really too bad. The modern Greeks, indeed, we know, go a step farther;[36] they not only in their common conversation fail to give the due prolongation to their long syllables, when unaccented—making no distinction between ω and ο—but they actually give _extension_ as well as _intension_ to all their accented syllables, and thus fall into the same sin as respects quantity that our academicians daily commit against accent. But there is not the slightest reason why we should imagine it necessary to imitate them in this idiosyncrasy. To do so would be for the sake of a superfluous compliment to the living, to cut off one great necessary organ, whereby the beautiful wisdom of the dead being made alive again becomes ours. The laws of accent are a most important element of the oratory of Pericles and Demosthenes; but without quantity the harmony of Homer’s numbers is unintelligible. There is no reason why we should sacrifice either the one or the other of these two great modulating principles of ancient Hellenic speech. The one, so far from destroying, does, in fact, regulate to a certain extent,[37] and beautifully vary the other. Quantity without accent were a monotonous level of dreary sing-song; accent without quantity can be likened only to a series of sharp parallel ridges, with steep narrow ravines interposed, but without the amplitude of grassy slope, flowering mead, and far-stretching fields of yellow-waving corn.

[36] See the essay on this subject in the second volume of the Greek works of Professor RANGABE of Athens.

[37] Every practical teacher ought to know how much more easily the doctrine of quantity may be taught with constant reference to accent than without it; so that pronouncing a word like ἡμέρα, the accent on the penult, is the easiest way to make the student remember that the final syllable of that word is long.

But some one will still press the question, _How am I to read Homer? how Sophocles?_ Is it not manifest, that if I read according to the spoken accent, and not according to the quantitative metre, though I may preserve myself, by decent care, from grossly violating quantity, I shall certainly fail to bring out anything that the ear of the most harshly-modulated Hottentot or Cherokee could recognise as rhythm? Now what has been said hitherto of the compatibility of accent and quantity relates only to words taken separately, or as they occur in the loose succession of unfettered speech—a purely elocutional matter: of the musical element of rhythm nothing has been said. That this must modify the singing or recitation of measured verses to a considerable extent, so as to make it different from the oratorical declamation of prose, is evident; but that there is no such incomprehensible mystery in the matter, as some people imagine, I hope I shall be able to make plain in a very few words. The poetry of the ancients differed from the mass of that now written in nothing more than in this, that it was considered as a living element of the existing music, and exercised in subjection to the laws of that divine art. Now the singing of words in music has the effect of bringing out more prominently the mass of vocal sound in the words, or what the prosodians in their technical style call quantity, while the spoken accent—unless it be identified with the musical accent or rhythmical beat—is apt to be overwhelmed altogether and superseded. That this must be the case the very nature of the thing shows; but we have a distinct testimony of an ancient musical writer to this effect, which will be useful to those who in all matters are constitutionally apt to depend more on authority than on reason.[38] This explains why, in the ancient treatises on poetical measures, we find not a word said about the spoken accent. If the full musical value of each foot, (or bar, as we call it,) in point of vowel-fulness, according to an established sequence be given, the poet is considered to have done his duty to the musician; the rhythmical beat, or musical accent, accompanies the measured succession of bars, as with us, but the spoken accent is disregarded. Of all this in our elocutional poetry we do, and must, in the nature of things, do the very reverse. Poetry composed primarily for recitation must follow the laws of spoken speech; and the spoken accent being the most prominent element in that speech, becomes of course the great regulator of poetical rhythm. Quantity, as the secondary element of spoken speech, though the principal thing in music, is not indeed neglected altogether, but left to the free disposal of the poet, so that the technical structure of his verse is in no wise bound by it. The musician then comes in, and finding that he has no liberty in the matter of the spoken accent, (the public ear being altogether formed on that,) exercises his large discretion in the matter of quantity, drawing out, without ceremony, a spoken quaver into a sung minim, or cutting short a spoken minim into a sung quaver. Now this license, familiar as it is to us, would have strangely startled, and appeared almost ludicrous to a Greek ear; and by the same effect of mere custom, we have to explain the fact, that the practice of composing poetry, without any reference to the spoken accent, practised by the ancients, appears to us so extraordinary. In our attempts to explain it, we have sometimes altogether lost out of view the fact, that music and conversational speech, though kindred arts, and arts in the ancient practice of poetry indissolubly wedded, have each their own distinctive tendencies and laws, to which full effect cannot easily be given while they act together; and every such case of joint action must accordingly be, to a certain extent—like the harmonious practice of connubial life—a compromise. My conclusion, therefore, with regard to the reading of Homer and Sophocles is, in the first place, that they were never intended to be read in our sense of the word, that they are not constructed on reading principles, and that, when we do recite them—as the ancients themselves no doubt likewise did—we must read them in a manner that makes as near an approach as possible to the musical principles on which they were constructed. With regard to the strictly lyrical parts of poetry, as Pindar and the tragic choruses, I have no hesitation in saying, that the only proper way to obtain a full perception of their rhythmical beauty, is to sing or chant them to any extemporized melody, (which would be much more readily done were not music so unworthily neglected in our higher schools;) while with regard to the dialogic parts of the drama, which were declaimed and not sung by the ancients themselves, the teacher must take care to accustom his pupils to a deep and mellow fulness of vocalization, and a deliberate stateliness of verbal procession, as much as possible the reverse of that hasty trip with which we are accustomed to read the dialogue of our dramatic poetry. The musical accent, or rhythmical beat, will, of course, in such a method of recitation, receive a marked prominence; the long quantity will never be slurred; and with regard to the spoken accent, what I say is this, the ear of the student must first be trained in reading prose never to omit the accent, and accustomed to feel, by the living iteration of the ear, that both accent and quantity are an essential part of the word. This many schoolmasters will not do, because it requires science, and will take a little trouble; but let such pass. Those who do so train the young classical ear, will find that in turning to poetry, and keeping time with their foot as they read any metre, the attentive scholar will not only readily follow the given rhythm, and appreciate the position of the musical accent, (very few human beings being altogether destitute of the rhythmical principle,) but will be able also to preserve the spoken accent in those places where the flow of the rhythm does not altogether overpower it. What I mean is this. In the line, for instance,

οὐλομένην ἣ μυρἴ Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε’ ἔθηκεν,

the second of the Iliad, the boy who has been properly trained to put the accent on the penult of οὔλομένην, preserving the long quantity of the final syllable, will, even though he retains that accent in the rhythmical declamation of the line, find no impediment to the rhythmical progress of the verse, but rather an agreeable variety, and an antidote against monotony; and though, on account of the strong effect which the rhythm always exercises on the closing word of the line, it will be difficult to give the full effect to the spoken accent on the antepenultimate of ἔθηκεν, while the closing musical accent lies on the penult, nevertheless, a person who has been accustomed always to pronounce this word in prose with its proper accent and quantity, will bring out the first syllable of the word much more distinctly than is done in the sing-song of a merely rhythmical recitation, and will not spoil the verse, but rather improve it. And if any person asks me how I prove that the ancients read Homer this way, I might content myself by giving a Scotch answer, and asking, _How do you prove that they read it your way?_ But, in fact, there is no possibility of their having read it otherwise; for having once introduced the habit of reading compositions, constructed originally on musical, not elocutional principles, with that habit they could not but bring in as much of the element of their spoken language as was consistent with the musical principle on which the very existence of the composition, as a rhythmical work of art, depended; that is to say, they allowed the musical principle of quantitative rhythm to prevail over the elocutional principle of accent, so far only as to produce harmony, not so far as to fatigue with monotony.

[38] Δεῖ τὴν φωνὴν ἐν τῷ μελῳδεῖν τὰς μὲν ἐπιτάσεις τε καὶ ἀνέσεις ἀφανεῖς ποίεισθαι—ARISTOXENUS, apud PENNINGTON, p. 226.

The reader will observe that I am not theorizing in all this, but speaking from experience; and therefore I speak with confidence. For ten years I read the Latin poets in Aberdeen, and I found no difficulty in reading them so as to combine the living effect of both accent and quantity, and teaching the student both by the ear alone. The first line of Virgil, to take an example, in respect of accent and quantity, may be read three ways. Either

ˏ ˏ
_Árma virúmque cānŏ Trōjæ qui prímus ab óris_

Or,
ˏ
... _cănō Trōjáe_ ...

Or,
ˏ ˏ
... _căn-ō Trōjæ_ ...

I take notice of these two words CANO and TROJǼ, only because they are the only two in which the musical accent of this line clashes with the spoken accent, the rules of which, though not marked in Latin books as in Greek, were preserved by the living tradition of the Roman Catholic Church, and the accentual Latin poetry of their Service, and are observed by our schoolmasters as faithfully (without knowing it, many of them) as they violate the accent of the Greek. Now, of these three ways of reading a Latin hexameter, the second is the only one which proceeds upon the principle of the quantitative rhythm exclusively, observing the spoken accent only where it happens to coincide with it, (as happens here in four bars of the six;) while the first, which is the vulgar English way, asserts the dominancy of the spoken accent in all the six cases; and yet, as the clash only takes place in two cases, preserves, without effort, (as I have just said with regard to Homer,) the flow of the musical rhythm. With that grossness of ear, however, which Erasmus and his learned Bear noticed in the learned of his day, they fall with respect to Latin, plump into the extreme error practised by the modern Greeks, and cannot accentuate the first syllable of CANO, without lengthening it, while the final syllable of the same word is generally deprived of its natural amount of sound, a strange error for a people to make with whom Latin verse making (I shall not say with what propriety) forms so prominent a part of school-discipline; but there is no end to their absurdities, no limit to their contradictions; the fact being, as one of themselves has distinctly stated,[39] that the “composition of classical verses with them is almost entirely MECHANICAL;” and yet they have the assurance to hold up this scholastic abortion to the admiration of the public as one of the indispensable elements in the training of that improved edition of the ancient Roman—John Bull. But to finish. The third method of recitation is, I think, the correct one. It violates neither quantity nor accent, but makes the one play with an agreeable variety over the other, as we see the iridescent colours in a gown of shot silk. I think I have now answered the question satisfactorily—_How is Homer to be read?_ If anything remains unclear, I shall be happy to communicate personally with any person who has an ear.

[39] “Our composition of classical verses is almost entirely mechanical. When a boy composes such a verse as _Insignemque canas Neptunum vertice cano_, how is he guided to the proper collocation of the words? Not by his ear, certainly, for that would be struck precisely in the same manner if he wrote it _Insignemque cano Neptunum vertice canas_; no, he learns from books that the first of _cano_ (I sing) is short, and the first of _canus_ (hoary) is long. Having so used them, their respective quantity is stored up as a fact in his memory, and by degrees he remembers them so well, that when he sees either of them used in a wrong place, he thinks it offends his ear, while in truth it only offends his understanding. But I apprehend a Roman boy’s process of composition would be quite different. Having been used from his cradle to hear the first syllable of _canus_ take up about twice as much time as that of _cano_, such a verse as _Insignemque cano Neptunum vertice canas_, would really hurt his ear, because in the second foot the thesis would be complete before the syllable was expressed, and he would have a time or σημεῖον too much; and in the sixth he could not fill up the time of the arsis without giving to the syllable a drawling sound which would be both unusual and offensive.”—PENNINGTON, p. 249. So long as such an absurd system of writing verses, whether Latin or Greek—from the understanding and not from the ear—is practised, the boys who refuse to have anything to do with prosody shew a great deal more sense than the masters who inculcate it.

Before concluding these observations, I have one or two remarks to make on MODERN GREEK, which have a vital connexion with the state of the argument. The reader will observe that I have from the beginning spoken of Greek as a living language, having had a continuous uninterrupted existence, though under various and well-marked modifications, from the days of Cadmus and his earth-sown brood to the present hour. Now the vulgar notion is, that Romaic, as it used to be called, though the present Greeks have with a just pride, I understand, rejected the epithet, is not only a different dialect of the Greek, from that spoken by Plato and Demosthenes, but a different language altogether, in the same way that Italian and Spanish are languages formed on Latin indeed, but with an organic type altogether their own. In this view Greek becomes a dead language; and the mass of scholastic and academical men who teach it habitually as such, without any regard to its existing state, will receive a justification of which they are not slow to make use. But this vulgar notion, like many others, has grown out of pedantic prejudice, and is supported by sheer ignorance. How such a notion should have got abroad is easy enough to explain. I mentioned already, that the English scholars—who have been allowed to give the law on such subjects—have so completely disfigured the classical features of Greek speech, that when they happen to meet Greeks, or to travel in Greece and attempt conversation, they can make no more of the answer they receive, than they can of the twitter of swallows, or the language of any other bird. Again, at Oxford and Cambridge, as is well known, the majority confine themselves to a very limited range even of strictly classical Greek, so that a man may well have received high honours for working up his Æschylus and his Aristotle, and yet be quite unfit to make out the meaning of a plain modern Greek book when he sees it; but the fact is, I have good reason to believe, there is not one among a hundred of their scholars that ever saw such a thing. Thirdly, we must consider under what a system of prim classical prudery these gentlemen are often brought up. They are taught to believe, and have been taught here also in Scotland publicly, that after a certain golden age of Attic or Atticizing purity, the limits of which are very arbitrarily fixed, a race of Greek writers succeeded who “increased immensely the vocabulary of the language, while they injured its simplicity and debased its beauty;” and under the influence of this salutary fear they regard with a strong jealousy whole centuries of the most interesting and instructive authors who do not come under their arbitrary definition of “classical.” Men who think that the vocabulary of the Hellenic language should have been finally closed at the time of Polybius, and who pass a philologic interdict against any phrase or idiom introduced after that period, will not be very likely to look with peculiar favour on the prose of Perrhæbus, or the poetry of Soutzos. But by a large-minded philologist all this prudery is disregarded. He knows that grammarians can as little cause a language to be corrupted and to die, by any dainty squeamishness of theirs, as they with their meagre art can create a single word, or manufacture one verse of a poem. Looking at the language of Homer and Plato as a real historical phenomenon, and not as a mere record in grammatical books, he sees that it went on growing and putting forth fresh buds and blossoms long after nice lexicographers had declared that it ceased to possess vitality. A language lives as long as a people lives—a distinct and tangible social totality—speaking it, nor has it the power to die at any point, where grammarians may choose to draw a line, and say that its authors are no longer classical. What “classical” means is hard to say; but as a matter of fact many persons will read the Byzantine historians with much more pleasure than Xenophon’s Hellenics, and not be able to explain intelligibly why the Greek of the one should not be considered as good as the Greek of the other. Greek certainly was not a dead language in any sense at the taking of Constantinople in the year 1453. If it is dead, it has died since that date; but the facts to those who will examine them, prove that it is not dead. No doubt, under the oppressive atmosphere of Turkish and Venetian domination, the stout old tree began to droop visibly, and became encrusted with leprous scabs, and to shew livid blotches, which were not pleasant to behold; but such a strong central vitality had God planted in that noble organism, that, with the returning breeze of freedom, and the spread of intelligence since the great year 1789, the inward power of healthy life began again to act powerfully, and the Turkish and Venetian disfigurement dropt off speedily like a mere skin-disease as it was; and smooth Greek sounded glibly again, not only in the pulpit, which was the strong refuge of its prolonged vitality, but in the forum and from the throne. Those who doubt what I say in this matter, had best go to Athens and see; meanwhile, for the sake of those to whom the subject may be altogether new,—and from the general pedantic narrowness of our academical Greek I fear there may be many such—I shall set down a passage from Perrhæbus, and another from a common Greek newspaper, from which the fact will be abundantly evident that the language of Homer is not dead, but lives, and that in a state of purity, to which, considering the extraordinary duration of its literary existence—2500 years at least,—there is no parallel perhaps on the face of the globe, in Europe certainly not.

“Κατὰ τὸ 1820 διατρίβων εἰς τὴν Σπάρτην ὁ Πεῤῥαιβὸς
ἐπὶ ἡγεμονίας τοῦ Πέτρου Μαυρομιχάλη, διέβη εἰς
Κωνσταντινούπολιν, κἀκεῖθεν εἰς Δακίαν, Βασσαραβίαν
καὶ Ὀδησσὸν, ὅπου εὗρε τὸν Ἀλέξανδρον Ὑψηλάντην
καὶ Γεώργιον Καντακοζηνὸν, φέροντας τὰ πρῶτα
τῆς Ἑταιρείας, καὶ μὲ ἀπερίγραπτον ἔνθουσιασμὸν
ἐτοιμαζομένους διὰ νὰ κινηθῶσι κατὰ τοῦ Σουλτάνου.
Τὸν αὐτὸν σχεδὸν ἐνθουσιασμὸν ἔβλεπέ τις οὐ μόνον
κατ’ ἐκεῖνα τὰ μέρη, ἀλλὰ καθ’ ὅλην τὴν Ἑλλάδα,
τόσον εἰς σημαντικοὺς, ὅσον καὶ παντὸς ἐπαγγέλματος
Ἕλληνας κατοικοῦντας εἰς πόλεις, χώρας καὶ χωρία.
Δὲν συστέλλομαι νὰ ὁμολογήσω, ὅτι ἤμην ἐναντίος τοῦ
τοιούτου κινήματος κατὰ τοῦ Σουλτάνου· ὄχι διότι
δὲν ἐπεθύμουν τὴν ἐλευθερίαν τοῦ Ἔθνους μου, ἀλλὰ
διότι μ’ ἐφαίνετο ἄωρον τὸ κίνημα, μὲ τὸ νὰ ἦσαν
ἀπειροπόλεμοι οἱ Ἕλληνες, καὶ οἱ πλεῖστοι ἄοπλοι, ὁ
δὲ κίνδυνος μέγας.”[40]

=Ο ΚΟΣΣΟΥΤ ΕΝ ΑΜΕΡΙΚΗ=.

“Τήν 6 Δεκεμβρίου εἰσήλθεν ὁ ἀρχηγὸς τῆς Οὐγγαρικῆς
δημοκρατίας εἰς τὴν πρωτεύουσαν πόλιν τῶν ἡνωμένων
Πολιτειῶν. Ἀπὸ τῆς πρώτης στιγμῆς τῆς ἀφίξεως του
ὅλοι οἱ ζωγράφοι παρουσιάσθησαν διὰ νὰ λάβωσι τὴν
εἰκόνα τοῦ διὰ τῆς ἡλιοτυπίας, ἀλλ’ ὁ Κοσσοὺθ κατ’
οὐδένα πρόπον δὲν ἠθέλησε νὰ δεχθῇ τοῦτο. Ἄλλος τις
εὐφυέστερος καλλιτέχνης ἐφεῦρε τὸ μέσον νὰ τὴν λάβῃ
ἄκοντος αὐτοῦ. Ἔθεσε τὴν μηχανήν του εἴς τι παράθυρον
κατα τὴν διάβασίν του καὶ ἐπροκάλεσε μίαν ἔριν ὲν τῇ
ὁδῷ διὰ νὰ σταματήσῃ τὴν τέθριππόν του. Τοιουτοτρόπως
δὲ κατώρθωσε νὰ λάβῃ λάθρα οὐχὶ μόνον τὴν εἰκόνα τοῦ
Μαγυάρου Ἥρωος, ἀλλὰ καὶ ἄλλων τεσσάρων εὑρισκομένων
μετ’ αὐτοῦ ἐν τῇ ἁμάξῃ. Ὁ Κοσσοὺθ εὕρισκετο ἐντὸς
ἁμάξης ὑπὸ ἕξ καστανοχρόων ἵππων συρομένης ἐφόρει
δὲ στολὴν Οὐγγρικὴν, καὶ ἐπὶ τοῦ πίλου τοῦ μέλαν
πτερόν.”[41]

[40] “Ἀπομνημονεύματα Πολεμικὰ, διαφόρων μαχῶν συγκροτηθεισῶν μεταξὺ Ἑλλήνων καὶ Ὀθωμάνων κατά τε τὸ Σούλιον καὶ Ἀνατολικὴν Ελλάδα ἀπὸ τοῦ 1820 μέχρι τοῦ 1829 ἔτους. Συγγραφέντα παρὰ τοῦ Συνταγματαρχοῦ Χριστοφόρου Πεῤῥαίβου τοῦ ἐξ Ὀλύμπου τῆς Θετταλίας, καὶ διῃρήμενκ εἰς τόμους δύω. Ἐν Ἀθήναις, ἐκ τῆς Τυπογραφίας Ἀνδρέου Κορόμηλα, Ὁδός Ἓρμου, Ἀριθ. 215. 1836.”

[41] “Αθηνα, Decemb. 31, 1851.”