Therefore, the French have no
verse worth the name- which is the fact put in sufficiently plain
terms. Their iambic rhythm so superabounds in absolute spondees as
to warrant me in calling its basis spondaic; but French is the only
modern tongue which has any rhythm with such basis, and even in the
French it is, as I have said, unintentional.
Admitting, however, the validity of my suggestion, that the
spondee was the first approach to verse, we should expect to find,
first, natural spondees (words each forming just a spondee) most
abundant in the most ancient languages; and, secondly, we should
expect to find spondees forming the basis of the most ancient rhythms.
These expectations are in both cases confirmed.
Of the Greek hexameter the intentional basis is spondaic. The
dactyls are the variation of the theme. It will be observed that there
is no absolute certainty about their points of interposition. The
penultimate foot, it is true, is usually a dactyl but not uniformly
so, while the ultimate, on which the ear lingers, is always a spondee.
Even that the penultimate is usually a dactyl may be clearly
referred to the necessity of winding up with the distinctive
spondee. In corroboration of this idea, again, we should look to
find the penultimate spondee most usual in the most ancient verse,
and, accordingly, we find it more frequent in the Greek than in the
Latin hexameter.
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