PLACE AND POWER OF ACCENT IN LANGUAGE. 307 



only in the element of music. Now, we need not at the present day set forth a 

 formal proof that Homer and the pre-HoMERic teachers of Greece were not 

 avayaxTTdt, but doiSot, and that all hexameter verse, the current form of the 

 oldest Greek metrical compositions, was originally sung, and not recited. 

 Under these conditions, it naturally conformed to the laws of musical compo- 

 sition ; and what these laws were, especially in relation to spoken accent, it is not 

 difficult to realise. What music principally demands from poetry is a mass of 

 rich and full vocalisation, to correspond with the measured flow of the notes ; for 

 the vowels are the musical element in human speech, and especially the deep 

 broad vowels pronounced long, and not rapidly rattled over. This element, 

 therefore, was naturally preserved in the first place : that is to say, Hellenic 

 poetry was founded on quantity. But what of accent ? The rhythmical march 

 of speech adapted to music, as every one knows, is secured by the element of 

 equality expressed in the succession of equal spaces of sound, marked by recur- 

 rent emphasized pulsations ; these pulsations constitute what is called the 

 musical accent, or beating of time, as it is vulgarly called. Now, it certainly 

 might have been desirable to make this rhythmical accent of the music cor- 

 respond in every case with the spoken accent of the words ; but this was not 

 done, for the very simple reason that the choice of poetical language would 

 have been too much fettered by the constant double demand on the poet of 

 conformity in every case, both with the spoken quantity and the spoken accent. 

 Nor should this appear at all strange. As it is, we see how often Homer — as 

 in aOavaros and other words — is obliged to put an artificial length upon tribrachic 

 feet in order to get them admitted into the dactylic march of his verse ; and how 

 impossible it would have been to compose a long poem under the strict law of 

 both quantitative and accentual conformity, we may see from the fact, that, in 

 our own poetry, we have contented ourselves with fettering one of the elements 

 and leaving the other free ; that is to say, that, while we never, or very rarely, 

 allow our spoken accent to clash with the rhythmical beat, we constantly take 

 the liberty in our sung psalms and songs of drawing out short syllables to any 

 length, and skipping over long ones with any amount of metrical celerity. 

 Here, therefore, the Gordian knot is untied : the Greek poetry made to be 

 sung is governed by quantity, the musical element of language ; the modern 

 poetry made to be read is governed by accent, the colloquial accent. What 

 Nature, or rather the necessities of Art, have kept asunder, let no man bring 

 together. Let no man imagine that colloquial accents, whether Greek or 

 Roman, can possibly come into collision with the laws of a poetry so essentially 

 musical in its character as the Greek. 



3. But the ancients, it will be said, though their poetry was all musical in 

 its birth, and a verse had no meaning except as sung, certainly did recite their 

 poetry at an early period. Of course ; and in this case it is obvious, that a 



