322 The Future Poetry
considerable attempt in this kind and have succeeded in creating
something like an English hexameter; but this was only a half
accomplishment. The rhythm that was so great, so beautiful or,
at the lowest, so strong or so happy in the ancient tongues, the
hexameter of Homer and Virgil, the hexameter of Theocritus,
the hexameter of Horace and Juvenal becomes in their hands
something poor, uncertain of itself and defective. There is here
the waddle and squawk of a big water-fowl, not the flight and
challenge of the eagle. Longfellow was an admirable literary
craftsman in his own limits, the limits of ordinary metre perfectly
executed in the ordinary way, but his technique like his poetic
inspiration had no subtlety and no power. Yet both subtlety and
power, or at the very least one of these greater qualities, are
imperatively called for in the creation of a true and efficient
English hexameter; it is only a great care and refinement or a
great poetic force that can overcome the obstacles. Longfellow
had his gift of a certain kind of small perfection on his own level;
Clough had energy, some drive of language, often a vigorous
if flawed and hasty force of self-expression. It cannot be said
that their work in this line was a total failure; “The Bothie of
Tober-na-Vuolich”, “Evangeline” and “The Courtship of Miles
Standish” have their place, though not a high place, in English
poetry. But the little they achieved was not enough to acclimatise
the hexameter permanently in English soil; nor did their work
encourage others to do better, on the contrary the imperfection
of its success has been a deterrent, not an incentive.
It is probable indeed that the real reason of the failure went
much deeper; it lay in the very character of the mould they in-
vented. The accentual hexameter was a makeshift and could not
be the true thing; its false plausibility could not be an equivalent
for the great authentic rhythms of old, its mechanically regular
beat, common, uninspiring, sometimes stumbling or broken, is
something quite different from the powerful sweep, the divine
rush or the assured truth of tread of that greater word-music.
The hexameter is a quantitative verse or nothing; losing the ele-
ment of quantity, it loses also its quality. Admitting that quantity
as it is ordinarily understood cannot be the sole basic element in