THE HEXAMETERS OF THE AUTHORISED VERSION.

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1443, 18 May 1912, Page 9

THE HEXAMETERS OF THE AUTHORISED VERSION.

A\o have all been accustomed to say— and some of us have even thought—that toe hexameter was entirely foreign to tho genius' ot English verse. It has become almost a.ll axiom. Kven in Greek or Jjaun, the pioper media of the classical verse-form, it is not easy to write good Hexameters—unless, indeed, you are a {'?" 11,s ', I" English—why, the irotJiUls of Parnassus aro strewn with tho bleacluug bones of the adventurers who have mado the great experiment. It is Li-uo that a great many pools have mado valiant endeavours. Aschani, Philip Sidliey, and lesser men amongst tho ancients • and amongst the poets of a later dale in tho nineteenth century, Coleridge, and Southey at first, with Clough and Kinsley amongst tho smaller men, and Browning and tiwii'iburne as the giants. (Wo may omit Longfellow witli his exasperatingly American "Evangeline".) Swinburne, of course, in his brilliantly audacious way, has written not only 'hexameters but also rhymed elegiacs. "Browning, as a composer of hexameters, is certainly at his best in "Ixion." Thero aro some good lines in Kingsley's "Andromeda," and if anyone reads Clough today, ho would certainly discover some passages of real beauty in the "Hothie." And now there is Mr. Way's "Odyssey." Yet is it not true, when all is said, and the ultimate concession made, wo resent tho hexameter as something alien from the genius of the language? Scuthey, you may remember, asserted, amongst' other reasons, that the difficulty lies in the fact that there are no real spondees in the

kj'o'lish language, giving the word Egypt ■ as tho only exception. A. good strong final (syllable has, apparently, to take the placo of the real spondee. the more remarkable, then, the compilers of tho Authorised Version should have happed 011 so many really excellent, hexameters? Southey also discovered one of them, though he admits ills indebtedness to a Bishop of Salisbury, who had anticipated him in the amazed recognition of the familiar verse,

\\ by do the heathen rage and tho peoplo imagine a vain thing?", as an excellent hexameter. There, it would soem, their discoveries stopped s lort. Both pious men, it is possible that they read their Bible only for edification, and not in search of English verse-forms, lucre are, however, many others to be tound by those who look for them; more, indeed, than wo had suspected, until, thinking the present-day interest in the tercentenary celebrations of tho AuthorIsei '. ' M'S'on a fitting moment for the investigation, we set ourselves the pleasant task ot collating them. Even now wo suspect we shall not exhaust the list. I'lio Psalms contain a good number apart from tho one already quoted. Everyone will remember this, not having realised its metre:

"God is gone up with a shoii't, the Lord with the sound of a trumpet." Then in tho ixtli Psalm we have this: "Thou ha.se rebuked the heathen, Thou hast destroyed the wicked." In tho xviiith: "At Thv rebuke, 0 Lord, at the blast of tho breath of Thy nostrils." And the lxxxiind, v. 7: "But ye shall die like men, and fall like one of the princes." In Job xxi, 24, with a pardonable anacrusis, one has this: "His breasts are full of milk and his bones are moistened with marrow." Ten or eleven chapters later, in that most marvellous piece of Hebraic poetry we find Elilui speaking in the same measure. He is mentioned also in an hexameter:

"Then was kindled tho wrath of Elihu, the son o( Barachel"— if the spondaic accent be permissible. At any rate in the next chapter but one, lie demanded with bitter emphasis:

"What man is like Job, who drinketh up scorning liko water?" And earlier in the book one finds tho pathetic line:

'Small and great are there, and the servant is free from his master."

It is, however, in certain of the Prophetic books that the lyrical impulse seems to have been most strongly present with the translators. In the magnificent fourteenth chapter of l'saiah from which luiskin quoted so effectively in "Sesame and Lilies" there is a sequence of verses that are perfect hexameters. It is surely allowable to describe the first of the series:

"Sineo thou art laid down, no feller is

come up against us." One would like to claim in the category the anapaestic pentameter that follows so closely:

"Thy pomp is brought down to the grave, and the noise of thy viols," but there is 110 doubt about the immediately sequent verses:

"How art thou fallen from heaven, 0 Lucifer, ton of the morning! "How art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!

"For thou hast said in thy heart 'I will ascend to Heaven; "I will exalt my throne above the staTs of God; "I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation'." A pedantic pedagogue, no doubt, might take exception to the trochees winch replace the proper dactvls in the last two verses; and it would-be easy to match them in any of the poems one has been taught to consider respectable hexameters. 111 chapter LIII of tho same prophet we have another line that is not open to the same reproach:

"We did esteem Him smitten, stricken . of God and afflicted." In the books of Jeremiah and Ezekiel also, hexameters.are to be found. In the first we have (iv 13):

"He shall come up as clouds, and his chariot shall be as a whirlwind." And in the second (vii '26): '

"Mischief shall come upon mischief, and rumour shall bo upon rumour." That is the last verse of this kind that we have been able to discover in the Old Testament, and a search in the Apocrypha has yielded 110 results. In the New Testament'they are by no means lacking. In the first Gospel, St. John Baptist sends his disciples to Christ saying:

"Art Thou Ho that should come, or do we look for another?" And, as might almost be expected, the gorgeous imagery of the Book of the Revelation contains several beautiful verses. Is it, for instance, unreasonable to describe these as hexameters, since the arsis in the fifth word in the first line is almost demanded by tho rhythm?

"I'liese are they who came out of great tribulation, And have washed their Tobes and made them white in the Blood,

"Therefore are they liefore the throno of God and serve Him.

"They shall hunger no more, neither ■ thirst any more." These verses from the seventh chapter are succeeded ill the twentieth by quite a perfect line: "Blessed and holy is he that hath paTt in the first resurrection." In the final chapter—the penultimate one ending up, by the way, with somo beautiful .anapaests, which one might almost claim as hexameters beginning with a pyrrhic foot—ono has this: "And they shall see His face, and His ' Name shall be in their foreheads, And there shall be 110 night there, and they need no candle, Neither light of tho sun, tor the Lord God giveth them light." . Professor, Mayor, in his most interesting "Chapters on English -Metre," makes, 111 the section on hexameters and pentameters, the naive observation that one or two hexameters "have been discovered" in the Authorised Version. We have shown that there are more .than ono or two.— "Saturday Review."