Retired (adjective).—Tired all over again.

There is something very amusing about vicious propaganda when it is so vicious, and so convinced of its own rectitude, that it can produce books with titles like The Romish Horseleech and mean those titles seriously.

The general premise of the Protestant anti-Catholic writers has always been that the falsehood of popery is obvious, and we need only hold it up to the light of day to convince people that it is obvious. That the Catholic Church might have reasons for its beliefs other than greed and outright satanism does not usually enter into our writers’ calculations. “Many are the errors and evils of Popery,” says the author of A Thunderbolt for Rome, “but the cause of them all is one only, namely, the withholding the sacred Scriptures from the people. The evils and sad effects of Popery are many, but the remedy and cure for them all is one only, namely, the free circulation and perusal of the Bible. The people need not to be admonished against the evils and idolatries of Popery; as soon as they read God’s holy Word for themselves, they will abandon it of their own accord.”

It is quite true that, in the past, the Catholic Church has occasionally been parsimonious with the Scriptures, keeping them out of the hands of ordinary people as long as it was possible to do so. The reason for the parsimoniousness was a belief that ordinary people are stupid, and left to read Scripture on their own will come to all sorts of daft conclusions. On the one hand, this belief is insulting and illiberal. On the other hand, it is objectively correct. We may console the Romanists for the current accessibility of the Bible in such a bewildering array of translations by observing that probably as many Catholic converts have gone over to the Popish side because of what they read in the Bible as Protestant converts in the other direction. Once you open the floodgates of Scripture, you must accept the consequences, and it is probably just as likely that a Protestant will become Catholic through excessive exposure to the sacred writers as that a Catholic will become Protestant.

None of our anti-Catholic propagandists would admit that, of course, and we can assume that they were sincere in their beliefs. They do not strike us as a bright lot. But our readers may judge the sincerity of these authors for themselves, because—as the regulars have already deduced—we have added a page of Anti-Catholic Propaganda to the Eclectic Library.

In choosing works for this collection, we were guided by the principle that they must be unintentionally amusing. There are plenty of dull works of theological argument that we could have added, but skipped because they did not amuse us. There are also plenty of works in which the anti-Catholic propaganda consists entirely of long quotations from Catholic liturgy, on the grounds, it seems, that simply exposing the Catholic liturgical books to the light and air would cause them to turn to dust. We have skipped those as well. We preferred to include only works that are breathtaking in their self-confidence, because pride goeth before a fall into a cake, as Mack Sennett could have told us. Thus the author who promises us that “This work contains, it is hoped, a complete refutation of Popery in a short space” is assured of a place in our collection.

At some future time it may amuse us just as much to collect a page of works of Catholic anti-Protestant propaganda. But it will be hard for the Catholics to stand up to the amusement value of the nineteenth-century Protestant writers we list here:

Anti-Catholic Propaganda at the Eclectic Library.

The Intoxiad, by Irving Vanderblock-Wheedle. “Beggars description”—Drunken Poets’ Quarterly. 8vo, 1,327 pp.

At least once in every generation, some clever classicist decides that Homer or Virgil ought to be translated into English in his own meter: namely the dactylic hexameter adopted by all the Greek and Latin epic poets. It seems such an obviously reasonable decision: why should we be false to the original intent of the poet and set our translation in some barbaric meter he would not even have recognized? Who could argue against it?

You, the reader, already know the answer to that question. Dr. Boli could argue against it, and he will, in one of those periodic essays that will send most of you off to Instagram to look at pictures of birds.

There is a fundamental difference between Greek or Latin versification on the one hand and English versification on the other. The rhythm of English poetry is based on accent; there is no such thing as “quantity” in English. Like almost any definite statement about almost any human language, this one must be qualified at once. In ordinary speech, different syllables have different durations: it takes much longer to say “snakes” than it does to say “at,” though the dictionary will tell you they are both words of one syllable. But there is no regular pattern to these differences, no mathematical formula that would create a rhythm and make them a suitable basis of meter in English.

In Greek or Latin poetry, on the other hand, quantity rules. Accent is irrelevant to the meter. The rhythm is made with long and short syllables; and the rule of the grammarians, in which they doubtless followed the longstanding practice of the bards, was that a long syllable was equal to two short syllables.

The basic unit of dactylic hexameter is the dactyl—a long syllable followed by two short syllables. Since a long syllable is twice the length of a short one, that gives us a “foot” of four beats, taking a short syllable as one beat. Other kinds of feet will appear in a line of epic poetry: the spondee, for example, which is two long syllables. But here again the foot is four beats: each of the two long syllables is equivalent to two short syllables.

Taking into account the cæsura, which is a pause in the middle of the line, and another pause at the end of the line, a classical epic marches along in stately 4/4 time. A good poet can do wonderful things to speed up or slow down that meter, to make it as ponderous as death or as light as children playing on the beach. But the dominant effect is serious and dignified.

But what happens when we try to haul that meter into English? We mark the lines the same way: macron, breve, breve. But now the marks indicate accented and unaccented syllables, not long and short ones. As music—and epic poetry is meant to be sung by a bard smitin’ ’is bloomin’ lyre—it is a completely different thing. We may call it dactylic hexmeter, but the dactyls are not the same dactyls. Where the Greek and Latin poems marched in stately 4/4 time, our English hexameters skip along in triplets. And that is an effect that in English suggests lightness and frivolity. An English-speaker who hears verse bouncing along in triplets immediately thinks, “There was a young man from Nantucket…”

To Dr. Boli’s ear, the only successful work in dactylic hexameter in English is Long­fellow’s Evan­geline, which is successful precisely because Long­fellow applied a great deal of poetic ingenuity to the problem of not letting his hexameters skip along like limericks.

This is why the successful translators of Homer into En­glish have always chosen iambic feet as the basis of their meter—just as our native English-speaking poets have always done when the subject is a serious one. Most of them reach for iambic pentameter, the meter of the Canterbury Tales and Hamlet and Paradise Lost—though perhaps the greatest En­glish translator of Homer, George Chap­man, set his translation of the Iliad in heptameter, or what an Eliza­bethan would have straightforwardly called fourteeners. The fourteeners, counting a pause at the end of the line, restore the 4/4 rhythm of the original, and perhaps that is the secret of Chap­man’s miraculous effect: he seems to have written the Iliad himself rather than translated it.

So now you understand why dactylic hexameter can never satisfy us as an English epic meter, and why translators who are real poets—Emily Wil­son, Alexan­der Pope, George Chap­man—have always chosen iambs. The next time you translate Homer or Virgil, you will do the same.

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If you would like to spend an afternoon comparing translations, we have extensive pages for Homer and Virgil in the Eclectic Library.

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