Ballades & Rhymes From Ballades in Blue China and Rhymes a La Mode

Part 1

Transcribed from the 1911 Longmans, Green and Co. edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org

BALLADES & RHYMES

From Ballades in Blue China and Rhymes à la Mode

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BY A. LANG

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“Hom, c’est une ballade!”—VADIUS.

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LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO. 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON NEW YORK, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA 1911

All rights reserved

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“Rondeaux, BALLADES, Chansons dizains, propos menus, Compte moy qu’ilz 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.

CONTENTS.

BALLADES IN BLUE CHINA. PAGE Ballade of Theocritus 15 Ballade of Cleopatra’s Needle 17 Ballade of Roulette 19 Ballade of Sleep 21 Ballade of the Midnight Forest 24 Ballade of the Tweed 27 Ballade of the Book-hunter 29 Ballade of the Voyage to Cythera 31 Ballade of the Summer Term 34 Ballade of the Muse 36 Ballade against the Jesuits 38 Ballade of Dead Cities 40 Ballade of the Royal Game of Golf 42 Double Ballade of Primitive Man 44 Ballade of Autumn 47 Ballade of True Wisdom 49 Ballade of Worldly Wealth 51 Ballade of Life 53 Ballade of Blue China 55 Ballade of Dead Ladies 57 Villon’s Ballade of Good Counsel 59 Ballade of the Bookworm 61 Valentine in form of Ballade 63 Ballade of Old Plays 65 Ballade of his Books 67 Ballade of the Dream 69 Ballade of the Southern Cross 71 Ballade of Aucassin 73 Ballade Amoureuse 75 Ballade of Queen Anne 77 Ballade of Blind Love 79 Ballade of his Choice of a Sepulchre 81 Dizain 83 VERSES AND TRANSLATIONS. A Portrait of 1783 87 The Moon’s Minion 90 In Ithaca 92 Homer 93 The Burial of Molière 94 Bion 95 Spring 96 Before the Snow 97 Villanelle 98 Natural Theology 100 The Odyssey 102 Ideal 103 The Fairy’s Gift 105 Benedetta Ramus 107 Partant pour la Scribie 110 St. Andrews Bay 112 Woman and the Weed 114 RHYMES À LA MODE BALLADE DEDICATORY 123 THE FORTUNATE ISLANDS 125 ALMAE MATRES 139 DESIDERIUM 143 RHYMES À LA MODE 145 Ballade of Middle Age 147 The Last Cast 140 Twilight 153 Ballade of Summer 154 Ballade of Christmas Ghosts 156 Love’s Easter 158 Ballade of the Girton Girl 159 Ronsard’s Grave 161 San Terenzo 164 Romance 166 Ballade of his own Country 168 Villanelle 171 Triolets after Moschus 173 Ballade of Cricket 175 The Last Maying 177 Homeric Unity 181 In Tintagel 182 Pisidicê 184 From the East to the West 187 Love the Vampire 188 Ballade of the Book-man’s Paradise 190 Ballade of a Friar 192 Ballade of Neglected Merit 194 Ballade of Railway Novels 196 The Cloud Chorus 198 Ballade of Literary Fame 201 Νήνεμος Αἰών 203 SCIENCE 205 The Barbarous Bird-Gods 207 Man and the Ascidian 212 Ballade of the Primitive Jest 215 CAMEOS 217 Cameos 217 Helen on the Walls 220 The Isles of the Blessed 221 Death 223 Nysa 224 Colonus (I.) 225 ,, (II.) 226 The Passing of Œdipous 227 The Taming of Tyro 228 To Artemis 229 Criticism of Life 230 Amaryllis 231 The Cannibal Zeus 232 Invocation of Isis 234 The Coming of Isis 235 THE SPINET 236 NOTES 237

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, æsthetic circles, of which the balladist was not a member.

The ballade was an old French form of verse, in France revived by Théodore 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 François Villon has been immortalised by a single ballade—Mais où 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 à 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.

Part 2

The Ballade of the Midnight Forest, the Ballade of the Huntress Artemis, was translated from Théodore 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.

À 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.

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