5em">This etext was produced from the 1911 Longmans, Green and Co. "Ballades and Rhymes" edition by David Price, email [email protected]

Ballads in Blue China and Verses and Translations

by Andrew Lang

Introduction
BALLADES IN BLUE CHINA.
   Ballade of Theocritus
   Ballade of Cleopatra's Needle
   Ballade of Roulette
   Ballade of Sleep
   Ballade of the Midnight Forest
   Ballade of the Tweed
   Ballade of the Book-hunter
   Ballade of the Voyage to Cythera
   Ballade of the Summer Term
   Ballade of the Muse
   Ballade against the Jesuits
   Ballade of Dead Cities
   Ballade of the Royal Game of Golf
   Double Ballade of Primitive Man
   Ballade of Autumn
   Ballade of True Wisdom
   Ballade of Worldly Wealth
   Ballade of Life
   Ballade of Blue China
   Ballade of Dead Ladies
   Villon's Ballade of Good Counsel
   Ballade of the Bookworm
   Valentine in form of Ballade
   Ballade of Old Plays
   Ballade of his Books
   Ballade of the Dream
   Ballade of the Southern Cross
   Ballade of Aucassin
   Ballade Amoureuse
   Ballade of Queen Anne
   Ballade of Blind Love
   Ballade of his Choice of a Sepulchre
   Dizain
VERSES AND TRANSLATIONS.
   A Portrait of 1783
   The Moon's Minion
   In Ithaca
   Homer
   The Burial of Moliere
   Bion
   Spring
   Before the Snow
   Villanelle
   Natural Theology
   The Odyssey
   Ideal
   The Fairy's Gift
   Benedetta Ramus
   Partant pour la Scribie
   St. Andrews Bay
   Woman and the Weed

"Rondeaux, BALLADES,
Chansons dizains, propos menus,
Compte moy qu'ils sont devenuz:
Se faict il plus rien de nouveau?"
CLEMENT MAROT, Dialogue de deux
Amoureux.

"I love a ballad but even too well; if it be doleful matter, merrily set down, or a very pleasant thing indeed, and sung lamentably." A Winter's Tale, Act iv. sc. 3.

INTRODUCTION

Thirty years have passed, 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 competition with Mr. Edmund Gosse; he need not be ashamed of the circumstance, 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