Milton is satisfied with throwing off the yoke of rhyme, and has made eumolpique lines of one foot only, measured by ten syllables. Their defect, inherent in the English idiom, consists, as I have said, in having all the lines bearing equally the masculine final, jarring continually one with the other. Klopstock has aspired to make, in German, verses measured by the musical rhythm of the Greeks; but he has not perceived that he took as long and short, in his tongue, syllables which were not such in musical rhythm, but by accent and prosody, which is quite different. The German tongue, composed of contracted words and consequently bristling with consonants, bears no resemblance to the Greek, whose words, abounding in vowels, were, on the contrary, made clear by their elongation. The rhythmic lines of Klopstock are materially a third longer than those of Homer, although the German poet has aspired to build them on an equal measure.[1] Their rhythmic harmony, if it exists there, is absolutely factitious; it is a pedantic imitation and nothing more. In order to make the movement of these lines understood in French, and to copy as closely as possible their harmony, it is necessary to compose lines of two caesuras, or what amounts to the same, to employ constantly a line and a half to represent a single one. Here are the first fourteen lines which contain the exposition and invocation of the Messiah:
Des coupables humains, célèbre, Ame immortelle, l'heureuse délivrance,
Que sur terre envoyé le Messie accomplit dans son humanité:
Dis comment il rendit les fils du premier homme à leur Auteur céleste;
- ↑ In comparing the first lines of Homer with those of Klopstock, it is seen that the Greek contains 29 letters, 18 of which are vowels; and the German 48 letters, 31 of which are consonants. It is difficult with such disparity in the elements to make the harmony the same.
