Ballades in Blue China Part 1

Ballads in Blue China.

by Andrew Lang.

INTRODUCTION

Thirty years have pa.s.sed, like a watch in the night, since the earlier of the two sets of verses here reprinted, Ballades in Blue China, was published. At first there were but twenty-two Ballades; ten more were added later. They appeared in a little white vellum wrapper, with a little blue Chinese singer copied from a porcelain jar; and the frontispiece was a little design by an etcher now famous.

Thirty years ago blue china was a kind of fetish in some circles, aesthetic circles, of which the balladist was not a member.

The ballade was an old French form of verse, in France revived by Theodore de Banville, and restored to an England which had long forgotten the Middle Ages, by my friends Mr. Austin Dobson and Mr.

Edmund Gosse. They, so far as I can trust my memory, were the first to reintroduce these pleasant old French nugae, while an anonymous author let loose upon the town a whole winged flock of ballades of amazing dexterity. This unknown balladist was Mr. Henley; perhaps he was the first Englishman who ever burst into a double ballade, and his translations of two of Villon's ballades into modern thieves' slang were marvels of dexterity. Mr. Swinburne wrote a serious ballade, but the form, I venture to think, is not 'wholly serious,' of its nature, in modern days; and he did not persevere.

Nor did the taste for these trifles long endure. A good ballade is almost as rare as a good sonnet, but a middling ballade is almost as easily written as the majority of sonnets. Either form readily becomes mechanical, cheap and facile. I have heard Mr. George Meredith improvise a sonnet, a Petrarchian sonnet, obedient to the rules, without pen and paper. He spoke 'and the numbers came'; he sonneted as easily as a living poet, in his Eton days, improvised Latin elegiacs and Greek hexameters.

The sonnet endures. Mr. Horace Hutchinson wrote somewhere: "When you have read a sonnet, you feel that though there does not seem to be much of it, you have done a good deal, as when you have eaten a cold hard-boiled egg." Still people keep on writing sonnets, because the sonnet is wholly serious. In an English sonnet you cannot easily be flippant of pen. A few great poets have written immortal sonnets--among them are Milton, Wordsworth, and Keats.

Thus the sonnet is a thing which every poet thinks it worth while to try at; like Felix Arvers, he may be made immortal by a single sonnet. Even I have written one too many! Every anthologist wants to anthologise it (The Odyssey); it never was a favourite of my own, though it had the honour to be kindly spoken of by Mr. Matthew Arnold.

On the other hand, no man since Francois Villon has been immortalised by a single ballade--Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan?

To speak in any detail about these poor ballades would be to indite a part of an autobiography. Looking back at the little book, 'what memories it stirs' in one to whom

'Fate has done this wrong, That I should write too much and live too long.'

The Ballade of the Tweed, and the Rhymes a la Mode, were dedicated to the dearest of kinsmen, a cricketer and angler. The Ballade of Roulette was inscribed to R. R., a gallant veteran of the Indian Mutiny, a leader of Light Horse, whose father was a friend of Sir Walter Scott. He was himself a Borderer, in whose defeats on the green field of Roulette I often shared, long, long ago.

So many have gone 'into the world of light' that it is a happiness to think of him to whom The Ballade of Golf was dedicated, and to remember that he is still capable of scoring his double century at cricket, and of lifting the ball high over the trees beyond the boundaries of a great cricket-field. Perhaps Mr. Leslie Balfour- Melville will pardon me for mentioning his name, linked as it is with so many common memories. 'One is taken and another left.'

A different sort of memory attaches itself to A Ballade of Dead Cities. It was written in a Theocritean amoebean way, in compet.i.tion with Mr. Edmund Gosse; he need not be ashamed of the circ.u.mstance, for another shepherd, who was umpire, awarded the prize (two kids just severed from their dams) to his victorious muse.

The Ballade of the Midnight Forest, the Ballade of the Huntress Artemis, was translated from Theodore de Banville, whose beautiful poem came so near the Greek, that when the late Provost of Oriel translated a part of its English shadow into Greek hexameters, you might suppose, as you read, that they were part of a lost Homeric Hymn.

I never wrote a double ballade, and stanzas four and five of the Double Ballade of Primitive Man were contributed by the learned doyen of Anthropology, Mr. E. B. Tylor, author of Primitive Culture.

A tout seigneur tout honneur!

In Ballade of his Choice of a Sepulchre, the Windburg is a hill in Teviotdale. A Portrait of 1783 was written on a French engraving after Morland, and Benedetta Ramus was addressed to a mezzotint (an artist's proof, 'very rare'). It is after Romney and is 'My Beauty,' as Charles Lamb said (once, unluckily, to a Scot) of an engraving, after Lionardo, of some fair dead lady.

The sonnet, Natural Theology, is the germ of what the author has since written, in The Making of Religion, on the long neglected fact that many of the lowest savages known share the belief in a benevolent All Father and Judge of men.

Concerning verses in Rhymes a la Mode, visitors to St. Andrews may be warned not to visit St. Leonard's Chapel, described in the second stanza of Almae Matres. In the writer's youth, and even in middle age,

He loitered idly where the tall Fresh-budded mountain-ashes blow Within its desecrated wall.

The once beautiful ruins carpeted with gra.s.s and wild flowers have been doubly desecrated by persons, academic persons, having authority and a plentiful lack of taste. The slim mountain-ashes, fair as the young palm-tree that Odysseus saw beside the shrine of Apollo in Delos, have been cut down by the academic persons to whom power is given. The gra.s.s and flowers have been rooted up. Hideous little wooden fences enclose the grave slabs: a roof of a ma.s.sive kind has been dumped down on the old walls, and the windows, once so graceful in their airy lines, have been glazed in a horrible manner, while the ugly iron gate precludes entrance to a shrine which is now a black and dismal dungeon.

"Oh, be that roof as lead to lead Above the dull Restorer's head, A Minstrel's malison is said!"

Notes explanatory are added to the Rhymes, and their information, however valuable, need not here be repeated.

A BALLADE OF x.x.xII BALLADES.

Friend, when you bear a care-dulled eye, And brow perplexed with things of weight, And fain would bid some charm untie The bonds that hold you all too strait, Behold a solace to your fate, Wrapped in this cover's china blue; These ballades fresh and delicate, This dainty troop of Thirty-two!

The mind, unwearied, longs to fly And commune with the wise and great; But that same ether, rare and high, Which glorifies its worthy mate, To breath forspent is disparate: Laughing and light and airy-new These come to tickle the dull pate, This dainty troop of Thirty-two.

Most welcome then, when you and I, Forestalling days for mirth too late, To quips and cranks and fantasy Some choice half-hour dedicate, They weave their dance with measured rate Of rhymes enlinked in order due, Till frowns relax and cares abate, This dainty troop of Thirty-two.

ENVOY.

Princes, of toys that please your state Quainter are surely none to view Than these which pa.s.s with tripping gait, This dainty troop of Thirty-two.

F. P.

TO AUSTIN DOBSON.

Un Livre est un ami qui change--quelquefois.

1880.

1888

BALLADE TO THEOCRITUS, IN WINTER.

[Greek text which cannot be reproduced]

Id. viii. 56.

Ah! leave the smoke, the wealth, the roar Of London, and the bustling street, For still, by the Sicilian sh.o.r.e, The murmur of the Muse is sweet.

Still, still, the suns of summer greet The mountain-grave of Helike, And shepherds still their songs repeat Where breaks the blue Sicilian sea.

What though they worship Pan no more, That guarded once the shepherd's seat, They chatter of their rustic lore, They watch the wind among the wheat: Cicalas chirp, the young lambs bleat, Where whispers pine to cypress tree; They count the waves that idly beat Where breaks the blue Sicilian sea.

Theocritus! thou canst restore The pleasant years, and over-fleet; With thee we live as men of yore, We rest where running waters meet: And then we turn unwilling feet And seek the world--so must it be - WE may not linger in the heat Where breaks the blue Sicilian sea!

ENVOY.

Master,--when rain, and snow, and sleet And northern winds are wild, to thee We come, we rest in thy retreat, Where breaks the blue Sicilian sea!